


Scenes From a Time-Travelling Life

by Nope



Category: Doctor Who, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-27
Updated: 2009-06-27
Packaged: 2018-10-31 19:51:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10906305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nope/pseuds/Nope
Summary: Martha Jones is having a typically non-typical day, Donna's indicators don't work, the Doctor finds him- (and her-) self on Terminus with unexpected companions, and a malignant force contrives to link things together across time and space for its own ends.





	1. Prologue

"Fictions are real, too, in certain forbidden regions of space-time. There are some places even Time Lords won't venture."   
  
"But you've been there?"   
  
"Yes." The Doctor smiled ruefully. "By accident."  
**\--Timewyrm: Revelation, by Paul Cornell**

#

_Once upon a time..._

The TARDIS was screaming.

He slammed the front doors behind him, fumbling at the latch with slippery fingers until it clicked. Why had he thought it a good idea to replace the originals with their large, easy to use handle? He stumbled to the console to throw the deadlocks, sealing himself in. Time howled outside. The blood smears left on the controls began to steam. Dragging the view-screen around, he squinted against the sharp mauve glare of the readouts, spiralling chains of Gallifreyan numerals spelling out imminent temporal collapse.

"Back," he muttered, pulling himself around the console. "Have to go back. Come on, old girl."

Still she screamed. The cloister bell sounded, deep and distant. The lighting dimmed from a bloody orange to a pulsating, clotted, red-black. He grabbed the plunger of the helmic regulator, yowling as it seared his hand but not letting go, forcing it down even as his skin bubbled and burst. The air was too thick, too hot. He stopped breathing, forced his eyes wide. Pain was irrelevant. The smell of his own flesh cooking was irrelevant. Chronoton alignment had to be exact.

"Come on," he whispered, entreated, cajoled, and finally threatened. "Come on, you piece of--!"

Groaning and juddering, the time rotor began to move, inching its way upwards.

"You beauty!" Crowing, he tore his hand away from the plunger and darted back around the console, banging on the dematerialisation circuits until they sparked and caught and the whole ship lurched around him.

Power swelled too fast for the surge protectors to cope and burst from the console in a superheated blast of vaporised mercury, setting his suit on fire, burning through him. Smoke billowed and he waved it frantically away, gaze darting from readout to readout, melting fingers mashing buttons in response. Another board blew, then all the roundels on the east wall, one by one. Huge thuds and booms started echoing from behind the doors to the rest of the ship as the internal architecture reconfigured, destroying rooms to make up for the power loss. The time rotor squealed in protest but it kept moving, now rising, now falling, faster and smoother with each trip until, with a triumphant, cacophonous roar, the ship tore itself free of space-time and plunged into the vortex.

Instantly, there was silence. The lighting shifted again, coming up cool orange-pink. Carbon scrubbers finally kicked in and he sagged against the console, allowing himself to breathe again.

"Best TARDIS ever," he gasped out, patting the console.

His hand came away wet and, when he lifted it to look, he found he could see his bones through the flesh, watch his muscles expand and contract as he wiggled his fingers.

"Ha! Will you look at that?" He beamed gleefully, spinning to show his--

There was no one else in the console room. Hadn't he had a companion? He couldn't remember. He'd had so many over the years. So many. He couldn't remember their names. There had been a Chris, hadn't there? With an odd surname. Mel. Benny. Jason, and ... Alice? No, that wasn't quite right. Gone now. Names and people, both. All left.

"Broke my heart," he coughed, sliding down the console. "Broke both my hearts!"

His chuckle became a wet, hacking noise, and he doubled up as cramps squeezed at him, red hot bands tight in his chest. No time left, then. Entropic cascade. Old doctors don't die, they just fade away. They--

No.

Not now. Not while there were still places to save and people to go. He reached inside, activating symbiotic nuclei and temporal platelets, triggering the Rassilon Imprimatur, feeling the TARDIS wrapping herself around him, trying to aid the process, to speed the healing and ease the change. He had time to wonder just what he would get this turn around (ginger, just once, go on) before everything exploded into golden light and he knew no more.


	2. PART ONE: DENNIS

"Where to next, then?" the Doctor asked, sprawled out with his trainers resting on the console, tossing a cricket ball from hand to hand.

The TARDIS hummed quietly around him.

"What do you fancy? A bit of sightseeing? Tour the seven hundred wonders of the universe? Go back to the groves of Villengard; stock up on bananas? Orrr," said the Doctor, desperation mounting in the face of continued impassivity, "we could find some nice little backwater where injustice is being done, overthrow the oppressive regime of the day, and establish a new and benevolent order!"

He wiggled his hands, all, 'da-dah!' The time rotor rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell.

"Nothing?" The Doctor sighed. "No. I might as well be talking to myself. In fact, I _am_ talking to myself. How sad is that?"

He stared at the slow blinking lights.

"Still," he mused, "it does guarantee intelligent conversation. So! Doctor!" He spun the ball idly on his fingertips, before bouncing it off the rotor and catching it again. "Where would you like to go today? In so far as there is such a thing as 'days' when you're not tied to planetary rotation and your various body cycles have irrational length periods." He bounced the ball again. "That certainly is an interesting philosophical point, Doctor, and we could discuss it in greater detail but today I think I would rather go toooo..."

He lifted the ball to bounce it again and then stopped, hand in mid-air, frowning.

"To," he repeated, and waited. And waited. "Oh, that's not good." He swung his feet off the console, sitting up properly. "Come on, Doctor. The vast wonders of space and time! You're only a thou-- nine hundred and something! Far too young for travel fatigue to set in. Think!"

He tapped himself on the temple with the cricket ball, and then bounced it off the rotor again. The TARDIS made a little whine of protest, which he ignored in favour of idly kicking the toolbox under the console.

"I guess I could actually do some of those repairs I've been meaning to for the last few years. Well, decades. Well, centuries." Then there were those dodgy fluid links he had been meaning to replace ever since his first incarnation. "Splendid idea, Doctor. Thank you, Doctor." He frowned, tossing the ball from hand to hand. "This is getting a bit creepy, isn't it? The talking to myself thing. I should stop. Though I do have a fine oratorical voice. My sixth incarnation, you remember him--"

The console lights twinkled and the Doctor took it as a response, though they had been doing that for some time.

"Now, he always claimed to have the best voice of us all. Claptrap and nonsense, of course. Terrible fashion sense. Suits! Suits are good. Perhaps I should go to my tailor?" he pondered, rubbing the cricket-ball against a stubbly cheek. "Or my barber. No, no. Still! Fine voice! I could have done Shakespeare, no innuendo intended."

There was the faintest shudder in the ship around him. He ignored it. Temperamental old thing.

"Good old Shakespeare." And Martha. And the witches, of course, but they weren't so much nostalgic as evil aliens trapped in a crystal ball he kept in a locker in the attic under the console. Which reminded him that he really need to have a look at the architecture configuration circuits because why was the attic under the console? That made no sense. "And ships should make sense, I think. A certain sort of sense. Ship-sense. Shape-sense? Ship-shape! Hey!"

He beamed at the console.

"Maybe I could have another go at fixing your chameleon circuit!" His sixth incarnation had botched it up, of course. 1986. Poor misjudged Lytton. And his seventh had fixed it and then he'd broken it again for reasons that had made sense at the time. That was the problem with regeneration. You could suddenly see all your old choices from new angles, see where you went right and, more often, where you went wrong. "Still. No point moping when there's tinkering to do. Allons-y!"

Hefting the ball, he started to throw it again. The view-screen instantly popped down into the way. Stumbling forward a little with the momentum of the aborted throw, he blinked at the screen and then pulled out his glasses, put them on, and blinked at the screen again. Numbers scrolled across it, sketching out a peculiar Fourier curve, something both new but oddly familiar, like listening to the Muzak version of some half-remembered sixties classic. (He really should visit John Lennon again.) There was something different, pulsing away in the background noise of the vortex.

"Hello," he said, balancing the ball on the top of the console so he could pull the view-screen around for a better look. "You're not supposed to be there."

Fingers deftly manipulating the controls by touch alone, he reconfigured the sensors to filter out everything but the new beat. Converting it into a five-dimensional vector equation, he projected the path onto a two-dimensional representation of a four-dimensional star-field map. A single point lit up, flaring from pink to mauve and back again. A planet, a planetoid, a moon, a ship; some place where someone was doing something potentially untoward. Or just randomly broadcasting a transtemporal signal, but either way was cool.

"Oh, ho!" Grinning to himself, he locked the TARDIS's materialisation circuits on the source. "That's more like it! Good girl!"

The Doctor patted the console, absently pushing the view-screen back. It knocked the cricket ball down, which took a bad bounce, spinning out of his reach, clanging off the grating and rolling out of sight. He ducked under the console, scrambling around as it managed to evade his reach, until the path forced him to crawl on hands and knees to follow it through the maze of hanging cables.

"I really need to tidy up in here," he muttered and shuffled around the corner to see the ball finally roll to a halt.

He pounced on it triumphantly and found himself suddenly nose to toe with a pair of black leather shoes. Following them up revealed a dark pair of trousers, a white shirt under a black blazer, a red and gold striped tie, and a teenaged boy with dark eyes and a mess of mousey-brown hair smiling quizzically down at him.

"Hello!" the boy said cheerfully. "Are we landing then?"

"What?" The Doctor straightened up quickly and promptly smacked his head against the underside of the console. "Ow!"

"Careful!"

"Why do people always say 'be careful' after you've already hurt yourself?" the Doctor asked, accepting the hand up and brushing himself down.

"So you don't do it again in future?" The boy -- the young man, really, though he was shorter than the Doctor was and could readily have passed for twelve instead of the sixteen or so he probably was -- tugged the Doctor around to check the back of his head. "Does it hurt? You're not bleeding."

The Doctor, who right up until that point hadn't been worried that he was, dodged away from the boy's poking fingers and tried to use his dim reflection in the view-screens to check the back of his own head, which never worked properly. (Except during accidental personal-time-line intersections, of course.) The boy watched with interest. He oddly reminded the Doctor of the young psychic lad he had met in 1914 in a way he couldn't quite put his finger on. Dean, hadn't it been? Or, no, Latimer. Timothy. "Tim?"

"It's Dennis," the boy corrected. "Dennis Creevey? Do you have amnesia again? Because I never did find out where Saint Louis is. Oh!" He beamed. "Maybe you have concussion! Unless you have some kind of concussion bypass system. Do you?"

"Cree--" the Doctor started and then interrupted himself to scoff. "'Concussion bypass'?! How would that even work?"

"I don't know how a respiratory bypass works either," Dennis said reasonably, "but you said you had one, and that it wasn't just you holding your breath for a really long time. Look!" He pointed at the screen. "We _are_ landing!"

He pushed his way around the Doctor with casual familiarity and flicked a few necessary switches that the Doctor was just getting to, thank you very much. The TARDIS's engines roared around them and the ship shook a little as it dropped out of the vortex. The Doctor grabbed the console for balance. Dennis just wobbled across the floor like he was on a ship, grabbing up a black robe with red trimming from where it was slung over one of the seats and pulling it on.

"Where are we, then?" he asked. "Is it a surprise?" He bounded back to the console as the ship settled, gaze darting across the readouts. "Nominal radiation, breathable air, pleasant temperature, and..." He tilted his head at the screen. "Some kind of transtemporal signal? A navigation beacon, maybe. It's a bit wibbly-wobbly, though. Oh!" He spun around again. "Are we _investigating_?"

The Doctor opened his mouth to answer and then shut it again, because Dennis had already bounced around him again to unseal the doors. Three quarters of the way there, he skidded to a halt and turned back with sheepish grin, clearly waiting for the Doctor to go ahead of him.

"Right," said the Doctor, pocketing the cricket ball and grabbing his brown coat from the hat-stand that he was half-sure that he'd left on Frontios. "Let's see where we are." Pulling the coat on, he reached out to open the doors, then paused, and looked back.

Dennis promptly recited, "Don't wander off, don't do any magic, don't press any buttons, don't introduce you as Merlin, and try not to get kidnapped."

That hadn't been precisely what the Doctor was going to say, but since it covered all major eventualities (and two - magic? Merlin?! - he hadn't even thought of) he let it go, opened the door, and stepped outside, right into the path of a stern, square-jawed, middle-aged man in a dark blue uniform that put the Doctor in mind of sixties-style English policemen.

"Is this your time-ship, sir?"

"Is..." The Doctor frowned at the man, looked down (neatly cut grass) and up (a sparse but glittering star field beyond an overarching dome that looked like glass but had to be transparisteel) and around (low, pretty gardens, a few benches, stone walkways) then back at the man. "What?"

"This space-time capsule," the man repeated patiently. "Is it yours, sir? Only there's no parking allowed on the grass."

The man pointed. There was a sign. It read 'No Parking on the Grass.'

"Right, yes, sorry, what was I thinking?" The Doctor pulled on a smile.

"I think he might have concussion," Dennis said, trying to edge around him to see. "Hello! I'm Dennis Creevey, and this is the Doctor. Where are we again?"

"Good place to come for concussion," the man allowed.

"Because people hit you on the head a lot here?" Dennis asked. They both stared at him. "So, no, then?"

"It's a hospital," the Doctor said, stepping aside to let Dennis out of the TARDIS and pointing to the far end of the gardens. Above the stairs leading down, someone had etched a green crescent moon into the pale-cream wall. "See? Universally recognised symbol."

"That's right," agreed the man. "Welcome to Terminus; please leave your vehicle in the designated landing area."

The Doctor stared. "Terminus?"

"That's a bit of a depressing name for a hospital, isn't it?" Dennis asked. "Also, I don't think the Doctor should be driving if he has concussion."

"I don't have concussion," the Doctor told him.

"You did park on the grass, despite the quite clear signs, sir," said the man.

"I do not have concussion!" the Doctor insisted.

The man just nodded complacently. "A service droid will park your vehicle for future retrieval. If you follow the blue line, it will take you to arrivals."

"I don't--!" The Doctor frowned, and then grinned. "Actually, yes, you know, I probably do have concussion, which is why I think I don't; so, absolutely, we will follow the blue line. Come along, Croydon."

"Creevey," Dennis corrected.

"Close enough," the Doctor agreed, already striding off across the grass.

* * *

It had been a long time, at least subjectively, since the Doctor had been here last, and that had been an accident (or, well, Turlough); moreover, the station had clearly been overwhelmingly refurbished since then. Despite his frankly prodigious memory, a thorough understanding of architectural aesthetics, and how if he concentrated he could feel the faint vibration of the engines, the Doctor was -- well, not lost, obviously, because he was the Doctor, and he didn't get lost; he just didn't know where the things he was looking for were. Which was quite different.

"I thought we were supposed to be following blue," Dennis said. "I can see why they put them down like that. Every corridor in this place looks exactly the same!"

They did, a bit; long and cream and with helpful (but unlabelled) coloured lines on the floor.

"Where do you think the monsters are?" Dennis asked.

"What makes you think there are monsters?" asked the Doctor, trying one of the side-doors and then pulling out his sonic screwdriver when it proved locked.

"There are always monsters," Dennis said. "Or killer aliens! Everywhere we go. Like the time in Greece with the robot men, and the cow-people on the moon."

The keypad bleeped, its light turning green, and the Doctor pushed open the door into the room beyond. It was a large, open space, with low, square, plush blue seats in the middle, a number of glass covered display stands around them, a matching door opposite and a row of headshots on the opposing walls. Letting Dennis in, the Doctor closed the door behind them and noticed, with some annoyance, the label 'Staff Only' on the inside, which meant they'd wandered out into public space again.

"Yep." Dennis nodded. "Should have followed the blue line."

"Why? What are we missing?" the Doctor asked, watching him carefully. "Something in particular you think I should see?"

Dennis shrugged, examining the portraits. "How should I know? I only just got here."

"Yes," the Doctor agreed. "You did."

"Hello? Do you talk?" Dennis waved at a headshot of a man with a beard and glasses. "No? I guess not. Muggle portraits are so boring. Oh!" He beamed at the Doctor. "Is this a test? Okay! So!"

He pulled a pair of brown framed glasses out and popped them on, peering around him. 

"I think--" Dennis drew the words out. "--that we should be looking at..." He looked in the display cases, examining a broken signal box and a green glowing tube. "Um. Oh! We could read the history of the station for hidden clues!"

"I already know the history," the Doctor said. "They cured Lazar here, and then turned the place into a research hospital for other diseases."

That wasn't the whole story, of course. It left out the part where long before that, Terminus had been a giant time machine that had jettisoned unstable fuel and possibly caused the Big Bang, although it wasn't the only explanation for the beginning of this universe he had been offered, and he liked to keep an open mind. Well, not too open. Open-ish.

Dennis considered this, and then beamed. "Oh! You can read it again, right, and then work out what the differences are between what they're saying and what you know, and use that to work out what they're trying to hide, and then we can go and find all their laboratories."

"They're clearly marked on all the floor plans," a clear, female voice informed them.

They turned to find a young woman, wearing a brown velvet jacket and corduroy pants, had entered. There was an ornate golden comb in her mass of brown curls and an interested, intelligent light in her pale eyes. Though small in stature and young in years, she nevertheless carried herself with aristocratic grace.

"There are no secrets in Terminus," she added. "May I help you, gentlemen?"

"Nyssa!" The Doctor beamed. "Hello!" He frowned. "It is Nyssa, isn't it?"

"That's correct," she agreed. "Doctor Nyssa Aliz. I'm sorry, have we met, Mister...?"

"Apparently not," the Doctor sighed. "Spatial genetic multiplicity. Gets you every time."

"Hello!" said Dennis, taking his glasses off. "I'm Dennis Creevey and this is the Doctor. He has concussion, maybe."

Aliz came forward, running a critical eye over the Doctor. "I'm sorry to hear that. I was on my way out, but I have a little time if you would permit me to examine you." She frowned prettily. "I'm sorry -- Doctor who?"

"No," Dennis corrected. "Just 'the Doctor'. It's his name."

She arched an eyebrow, smiling a little. "Mister Doctor?"

"Just the Doctor," the Doctor said. "I'm not a mister. Or a miss. Or a doctor. Doctor Doctor, wouldn't that be terrible?" He didn't wait for a reply. "No secrets in Terminus. That's good. I've never been a fan of them. Perhaps you could give us a tour?"

" _The_ Doctor," Aliz repeated slowly.

"That's me." He waved at her. "Hello."

She graced them with a beatific smile. "Oh! This is wonderful! It really is a pleasure to meet you, both of you. You have no idea how much I've wanted to meet you. I wrote my doctoral thesis on the research methods pioneered by the first doctor -- that is, you would have known her as Nyssa of Trakken. I am right in that, aren't I?"

"Oh!" said Dennis. "That Nyssa! I've seen pictures of her in the TARDIS logs. You're both very pretty."

"Well, thank you." Aliz gave Dennis a quick, friendly smile, but her attention was quickly back on the Doctor. "I hope this isn't too much of an imposition, but I would very much like to take a look at your ship. Dimensional transcendentalism has always fascinated me, though I find I have no particular talent for such pure physics; biology is much more my field. Speaking of, I see you've regenerated. The bone structure, the hair -- amazing!"

"I like to think so. Tell you what," said the Doctor, "I'll do you a swap. I'll give you a tour of my ship, if you give me a tour of your time experiments."

"Absolutely," agreed Aliz instantly.

"Ah hah!" said Dennis. "So you admit it!" They both stared at him. "Well, she did. Ah hah?"

"I was hoping to ask," Aliz said to the Doctor. "I know you won't compromise the integrity of our history but, truly, any pointers at all would be of utmost value. Please, if you would follow me?"

* * *

On the way down to her laboratory, which proved to be a large white room full of interesting medical equipment at the very heart of the station, Aliz explained to Dennis that Terminus had once been a great experiment in time travel that had gone horribly wrong, leading one fuel pod to explode and leaving the other in an unstable condition. It had been made safe over the years, but proved unusable as power source for more conventional superluminal engines and so had remained unused and quarantined over the years while the hospital was built around it. Experiments with controlled radioactivity had provided a simple and effective cure for the Lazars and the doctors subsequently had extended research into using various different forms of energy for similar effects against other diseases.

"It was then that we chanced upon certain unique properties of what I believe you call artron energy, a side-product of the natural breakdown of Terminus's fuel," Aliz said, logging into one of the terminals to allow the Doctor to examine their research notes. "It permeates the whole station, at a low level."

"We're being irradiated?" Dennis asked. "Isn't that bad? Will my hair fall out? I like my hair!"

"Artron energy is harmless to most carbon-based life," Aliz assured him. "Indeed, it has been shown to reduce DNA mutation and enhance the immune systems of many species."

"So you zap people with this energy and then they become super healthy?"

"In essence, yes." Aliz nodded.

"That's not where you stopped though," said the Doctor. "You're trying to -- Dennis!"

Dennis snatched his hands back from the device he was examining and attempted to look innocent. "I didn't touch anything!"

It was the smallest piece of equipment in the room, a flat, somewhat bumpy oval split into two screens, each about hand-sized. Aliz picked it up, thumbing it on with practiced ease. "It's just a simple scanner. We have more sensitive instruments for specific purposes and, of course, there are passive scanners built in, but for simple, gross-level work, it suffices. Curious," she added, aiming the scanner at Dennis. "Perhaps it needs recalibration."

The Doctor deftly took it from her, also aiming it at Dennis. An image of the lad appeared on the right hand screen, while data oscillated across the left. "Homo magi," he said. "Nothing to worry about; just an example of parallel divergent evolution." Which explained the Merlin remark. He really should drop in on Anslem and Bambera again some time. He fiddled with the controls for a moment, moving the scanner every time Dennis tried to lean over and see, and then tried it on Aliz. "You're part Trakenite."

"That's right," Aliz agreed.

"Hmm," said the Doctor in a non-committal sort of way, still fiddling with the scanner as he wandered around the room.

"Hey," Dennis said, frowning, "how can something be both parallel and divergent? That doesn't make sense."

"I'll explain later," the Doctor said absently, approaching a piece of equipment so large that the full sized bed in the middle of it looked toy-sized. Large circular frames, as wide as the Doctor was tall, looped around the bed like a half-finished tunnel. There were rows of emitters along the inner edge and a number of safety warning lights on the outer shell. The Doctor ran the scanner over them, before ducking down to look at the machinery built into the base of the bed.

"Oh, this is, this brilliant!" He beamed at Aliz. "Minyan construction?"

"It's based on designs from Minyos II, but it was adapted locally using reverse-engineered Terminus technology with-- Excuse me!" she called to Dennis who was tugging at the handle to one of the interior doors. "That's a restricted area; I really can't let you in."

"Ah hah!" Dennis beamed. "The secret room where the real diabolical experiments take place!"

"...is he always like this?" Aliz asked the Doctor.

"I don't know," the Doctor said.

"Because he has concussion," Dennis said, adding over the Doctor's protests, "Why can't I go in, then?"

"That's the bombardment area where we expose people to controlled radiation bursts." Aliz touched a control that made the windows in the door turn from opaque black to transparent, and Dennis stood on tiptoes to look through. "The room is scrubbed down regularly and, generally speaking, the residual radiation levels should be harmless, even over extended periods; however, in the interests of good health and safety routines, we don't allow anyone in without adequate protective equipment."

Dennis frowned. "I thought the energy made you better?"

"It's like chocolate frogs," the Doctor said. "If you eat a few, they taste good, but if you ate a few thousand, you'd be sick everywhere."

"Ohhh." Dennis nodded. "Does artron energy fix concussion too?"

Aliz nodded. "It can do, though we would not usually use it for such a mild ailment." She touched one of the cabinets, and a draw slid out with a faint hiss. Grey foam held rows of glittering gold vials, and a small gun-like injector for using them. "We have a broad range of neurological enhancers to provide buffering against brain injuries, nerve damage and the like. We often use them to strengthen test subjects before the process."

"Neat!" Dennis reached for one and then paused. "May I?" Aliz nodded again. "Cool." He took one of the vials out and held it up to the light. "It sort of looks like Felix Felicis."

"'Lucky Luckys'?" Aliz repeated dubiously.

"It's a potion," Dennis started.

There was a loud whistle from the bed and they both turned to see the Doctor prodding at one of the emitters with his sonic screwdriver, looking worried. They both approached the bed, Dennis absently pocketing the vial.

"Is this a scanner too?" Dennis asked. "It sort of looks like one of those magnet brain things."

"MRI," said the Doctor, "and no. This is part of the artron experiments. Artron energy has a certain--" He hunted around for a simple phrase. "--temporal component to it; it's a field whose associated particle actually travels in cis-chronal orbits. Well, that's not the important. The important part is, it can be used to sort of ... run the body backward, to return it to a state before damage was done."

"Like regeneration?" Dennis asked.

"A sort of clumsy, minor, artificially induced regeneration," the Doctor agreed.

"Reverse biotemporal fields are the future of non-invasive medicine," Aliz said. "The power costs are astronomical, of course, and it will never be a common cure-all, but I believe we may be able to reduce otherwise debilitating diseases to chronic illnesses that people will be able to comfortably live with. In fact," she added, checking her chronometer, "I'm due at a meeting with Queens Boudacia very shortly to discuss funding. I'm not sure this is appropriate, Doctor, but if there is anything you could tell me, anything at all...?"

"Your RBT machine is currently emitting artron pulses," the Doctor said.

"So we're getting healthier?" Dennis asked.

"Right now? Probably. Soon?"

Dennis nodded his understanding. "Thousand chocolate frogs time."

Aliz looked from one to the other and then back again. "That's impossible. We have very strict standards for use and shielding. All our equipment is tested to tolerance long before it even reaches the laboratories, let alone gets used."

"See for yourself," the Doctor said, handing her the scanner. "Watch the frequency shift ... there. Aaaand there. Then here and here, before it loops back again."

"I don't understand." She fiddled with the controls, but the evidence didn't change. "You must have modified the scanner somehow with your sonic manipulator." She looked up at the Doctor, but he just sadly shook his head. "I really don't understand how this can be happening. No one has activated the RBT field emitters. The safety cut-outs should have been tripped a hundred times over if these readings are correct."

"Now imagine what would happen if you turned the machine on and left it for a few minutes," the Doctor said.

"Chronal cascade," Aliz said. "Massive entropic failure."

"And that would be bad?" Dennis asked.

"It would be cataclysmic," the Doctor said. "You'd open a rift in local space-time."

"I just..." Aliz made a bewildered noise. "None of our theoretical or scaled test models showed anything like this. I really do not understand how this is possible."

"Maybe it's sabotage," suggested Dennis from where he had wandered off behind them.

"You did say there were no secrets on Terminus," the Doctor said. "Perhaps someone doesn't approve of your work?"

"No secrets, yes, but you can't come down to the laboratories without being accompanied by a member of the staff," Aliz said, "and I trust them all perfectly. They are scientists; rational, intelligent people. They would come to me if they thought there was a problem. I cannot believe any of them would stoop to committing sabotage. What would it achieve?"

"Okay," Dennis nodded. "Only there's a woman in the radiation bombardment thingy where no one is supposed to go without protective gear."

"Impossible. This is the only door." Aliz and the Doctor hurried to join Dennis at the doors. "How would she have--"

The Doctor pushed Dennis aside so he could look, catching a glimpse of blonde hair spilling over a blue jacket before the windows turned suddenly opaque again.

"Get it open," he snapped at Aliz and then, when she didn't move fast enough, pulled out his sonic screwdriver. He aimed it at the electronic lock to no avail. "Deadlock sealed!"

"The computer systems aren't recognising my login," Aliz said. "I can't get control back."

"Let me," Dennis said. He pulled a wand from his sleeve and, before the Doctor could stop him, pointed it at the door and said, " _Alohamora_!"

The lock panel sparked wildly; the door jerked halfway open and jammed, motors grinding.

Aliz stared. "Telekinetic manipulation through vocal recitation and symbolic psychic focus! Is he part Carrionite?"

"I'll explain l-- Dennis!" yelled the Doctor, making a grab for the boy.

Dennis had already easily dodged through the gap. "Come on," he yelled back. "I can see her!"

"Stay here," the Doctor ordered Aliz, squeezing after Dennis.

The room didn't seem particularly big, but it was full of moveable radiation screens, converting it into a veritable warren. Catching a glimpse of red and black, the Doctor dived after Dennis, only to find Aliz on his heels.

"They never listen!" he muttered. Louder, he added, "Stay close!"

"Yes, Doctor." She nodded. "Which way?"

Seeing Dennis round the far corner, the Doctor grabbed the nearest screen and pushed it hard. Aliz joined him, pushing the next screen the other way, giving them a gap into the next 'corridor'.

"I see her," Aliz announced. "Excuse me! Please! We just want to talk!"

The woman had already ducked through the next gap. The Doctor lengthened his stride, but Dennis got there first, wand up again.

"I'll stun her," he called, yelling " _Stupefy_!" over the Doctor bellowing his name.

Red light flared out but, before it could reach the half-glimpsed woman, there was a massive burst of light and a noise like electricity crackling and suddenly she was gone. The stunner kept going, passing through the now empty space, and smacked into one of the movable screens, which tumbled backwards, striking another, and then another. The continued to fall like dominos, crashing into the walls. A warning siren sounded loud above them.

"The RBT field!" Aliz yelled over it. "It's been activated!"

"Shut it off!" The Doctor yelled back.

She looked around the room frantically, and then pointed. "The terminal, behind there; help me!"

"Um, Doctor," said Dennis, backing towards him.

"Not now," the Doctor said, trying to get the screens moving. It was a lot harder when they were half-lying on each other. "Help here."

"Doctor!" Dennis said again. "I really think you should--"

The Doctor felt the air ripple through him. The TARDIS screamed in his head. He saw Aliz still trying to move the screens, straining in slow motion. He saw Dennis, still backing towards him, wand raised. He saw the air rip open on a swirling void, the tear expanding too fast even for Time Lord vision. He tried to reach for his screwdriver, but it was like moving through treacle, that or marmalade, actually, he could definitely smell marmalade--

Hideous red-blue-red light swept over them.


	3. PART TWO: MARTHA

Gasping, Martha Milligan jerked awake.

The room was dark and quiet, save for the faint ebb and flow of distant traffic. The clock blinked at her, over and over, turning five-ten in the morning into five-eleven. She rolled over onto her back, panting a little, her heartbeat loud in her ears. She had been with the Doctor -- no, she had been dreaming she was with the Doctor, and there had been something... It was already fading, certainties leaking away, details blurring. Everything melting away. She blinked at the ceiling to clear her eyes.

An arm draped itself across her waist. The light from the alarm clock glinted off the wedding ring, and she turned her head to see Tom looking sleepily at her from the next pillow.

"Bad dream?"

"Yeah." She frowned. "No." She rolled towards him with a little half-shrug. "Just weird. It was... Do you ever have those dreams where, when you wake up, you're not sure if it was a dream or a memory?"

Tom considered this, and then shook his head, smiling a little. "Never."

"I could go off you," Martha said, but she smiled, and his smile grew.

"No, you couldn't." His hand traced her side, coming to rest against her hip, warm, solid and comforting, giving her space but being there for her too.

"No," she agreed. "I couldn't."

"Sleep more," he said. "Doctor's orders."

Martha lifted her head to check the clock on his side of the bed rather than rolling over again. "No point. I have to get up for work in an hour. Less."

"Tell them I kept you on Brazilian time." His thumb drew lazy circles on her skin.

Martha let out a soft laugh. "That might have worked last week, when you first got home. They'll never buy it."

"What's that saying about military intelligence?" Tom said. Martha mock glared. He just smirked. "And those names! UNIT. Touchwood. It's a psychologist's wet dream."

Martha smacked his shoulder, grinning. "It's Torchwood; although, no, yeah, Touchwood is pretty accurate."

"But they don't need you for an hour?" He gave her a suggestive look.

"Forty-five minutes," Martha said, but she slid in closer, lifting a hand to brush the hair back from his forehead and trail a finger against his beard.

"There's this ache I've been meaning to mention," Tom said, making Martha laugh. "I think I need some hands-on medicine, Doctor Jones..."

* * *

They pleasurably wasted more than an hour in bed and then ended up sharing a shower in a way that necessitated another rather colder shower afterwards. While Martha rushed about the flat they shared, getting ready, Tom sauntered around wearing only a pair of boxers, making her coffee and then a packed lunch he insisted she take with her. Most places she worked these days had cafeterias, mess halls, or whatever, but it was common for her to get involved and forget to leave her desk or bench for hours at a go.

"You know if I forget to go and have lunch, I'm going to forget I have lunch with me, right?" she asked, grinning at him as she unlocked her car.

Tom answered with a blown kiss. "Drive safe. No speeding!"

"Hey! You're the one who made me late!" Martha grinned at him, half-exasperated, half-amused. "You are so in for it when I get home, mister."

"Looking forward to it," he yelled after her.

She laughed and waved, pulling away smoothly and accelerating down the road. The outside of the car was a common, unremarkable Ford, but UNIT had gotten paranoid ever since the ATMOS debacle, and the insides were all custom made and fitted by trusted personnel. Among other things, it meant the car constantly broadcast its position to UNIT HQ and had a good built in communications system. Not universal roaming on a super-phone good, but the best human reverse-engineered alien technology could supply. On the upside, it meant she was always a button away from back-up and, on the down-side, it meant they could work out she was the closest doctor to a scene, call her up half-way to work and redirect her.

Commuter traffic was already filling the streets, backlogged by a broken down car, but she managed to weave her way across back roads and side streets. Less than ten minutes after the call, she pulled up to the front of an old Victorian house that served as an off-base dormitory for college-age recruits to UNIT's UK science division. Martha herself had stayed here some time before, cramming medicine for nineteen hours a day while Colonel Mace pushed for early exam admission. It hadn't been horrible, exactly, just extremely draining, and she'd left fully intending never to see the place again.

Really, she mused as she got out of the car, thoughts like that were just asking for things like this.

Hefting her medical gear, Martha reached for the doorbell, but the door opened before her hand got there, revealing Captain Price, who sighed in relief. "Oh, thank god! I thought they'd send me Sullivan. I really don't care who his uncle is; the kid's a useless berk. Come on, we're up on the first floor."

"So what is it?" Martha asked, following her towards the stairs. "Another stressed student's prank gone horribly wrong?"

"You tell me. The housekeeper came in with milk and the morning papers at her usual time, leaves them in the kitchen and comes upstairs to check on the lads -- we have four in right now, nabbed a couple out from under the noses of Porton Down -- and found them like this." Captain Price pushed open a door at the top of stairs that Martha remembered as leading to a communal lounge. "That was almost forty minutes ago now. We didn't want to move them until you said we could."

She stepped out of the way to allow Martha in first. The room was the same shape Martha remembered, but that was all it had going for it. The television and sofas had gone. For that matter, so had the curtains and the carpet. Arranged across the middle of the room were four old cast-iron bathtubs, each one filled to the brim with ice, each one occupied by a naked student, propped up so their heads were just out of the water. A couple of paramedics stood over them.

"Are they dead?" Martha asked, hurrying over.

"Heavily sedated," said one of the paramedics, a balding middle-aged man.

"We think so, anyway," added his companion, a younger woman with chestnut hair pulled back in an austere bun. Their badges identified them as Brown and Chavez respectively. "Slow pupil response, steady but weak pulses."

"They have to be suffering hypothermia," Martha said, kneeling by the first tub. A mobile phone rested in the soap-tray. "Why on Earth wouldn't you move them?"

She reached for the occupant, a mop-haired young man in his early twenties with morning stubble, expecting to feel cold, clammy skin. The neck was damp enough, what with having come up out of the bath, but warm under her fingers, which was -- well, you learned quickly not to say impossible in this job, but certainly implausible, even if the bodies had been placed in the tub only seconds before they were found. Martha looked at the paramedics for confirmation and got matching nods.

"That," said Brown. "And there's something else--"

"They were all left with phones," Captain Price put in. "One per tub, each with the number for emergency services pre-selected."

"We think, well." Chavez glanced at her partner, then back again. "I mean, you hear about this sort of thing, don't you?"

"What sort of thing?" Martha asked absently, pulling her penlight out and carefully pulling the man's eyelid back, checking pupil reaction. She looked back when Chavez didn't answer, then at the left phone, and then back at the ice. "Oh, you have got be kidding!"

Pulling her sleeves up, she carefully worked an arm under the body, biting back a curse at the cold. Even deep under the water, the body was warm. She trailed her hand down it (him, she reminded herself, this is a person), searching. There was a raised vertical ridge above the hip just where she didn't want to find one, a recently sutured wound. It would leave quite a scar -- but then, you needed a bit of room to remove someone's kidney cleanly.

"This has to be a hoax," Martha said. "People don't steal organs -- and if they did, they wouldn't bother with just one."

"People may not," Captain Price started and then, with a quick look at the paramedics, asked "Recommendation?" instead.

"Help me lift this one out," Martha decided. There was a blanket in her kit, which she quickly rolled out. "If his condition doesn't deteriorate, we'll retrieve the others; you have transport?"

"We've an ambulance parked out back," Brown said, coming to help her with the arms. "It'll be a bit of a squeeze, but we can carry all four. What do we do if they need the cold? We can't risk them going into convulsions and shock mid-transit."

"If we can't move him, we'll move the baths," Martha said, looking at Captain Price for confirmation. Price nodded, moving to take the man's feet with Chavez. "On three, then. One, two--"

They heaved together, ice and water rushing everywhere as they lifted, carrying the man to the blanket and laying him down.

"There seem to be no physiological reactions to the cold whatsoever," Martha said, amazed. "No skin discoloration in the extremities. If he wasn't wet, you couldn't believe he had been in the bath at all." She grabbed her stethoscope and checked the man's heartbeat, listened to his lungs, which sounded clear. "Breathing is clear and unimpeded." She rapped the man's knee, watched him twitch. "Autonomic reflexes seem normal." That portable ultrasound she hadn't picked up would have been handy right now. "Can you lift him?"

"Yeah." Brown and Chavez did, turning the man onto his side.

"Looks like surgery to me," Price said. "Something thin and sharp did that. I'd say razor if it's not a scalpel."

"Seen a lot of knife wounds?" Martha asked as they turned the man flat again.

"My fair share. How long before we're sure he's okay to move?"

"Medically sure, I'd say never, unless we could get more equipment in here, do a proper scan. For going on with--" She touched his neck again. "Pulse doesn't seem to be changing. His breathing is staying regular. Give it a few minutes."

"I'll fetch the stretcher up," Chavez said, standing.

"I'll call ahead. We have private wards locked off at Heartswood, just down in Chiswick," Captain Price said.

Martha nodded. The whole thing felt off, somehow. She felt like she should be urgently rushing to do something, but all four students actually seemed in relatively stable condition. In, point of fact, much better condition than they should be. Why the phones? What good would they have done? It felt... Contrived. Like a set-up, a hoax, a prank.

"I'm going to take a quick look around," she decided, standing abruptly. "Keep an eye on these."

Brown nodded. "Yes, ma'am."

* * *

To her disquiet, a search of the rooms revealed nothing of interest. Everything looked in place. There wasn't anything unusual in the medicine cupboard (a few Lemsips, some Advil, and a half-empty and out of date bottle of cough syrup) or in the trash. Ready-meals filled the fridge and freezer, microwavable crap instead of real food, but she'd lived like that too. There was no sign of the missing furniture, or of any sedatives. If the students were hoaxing them, they had hidden their tracks well.

Giving it up as a lost cause, she helped the others get the other three students out of the baths and all four of them down the ambulance. Making certain they secured the patients as best they could be in an ambulance really only designed for two, Martha left them to go ahead, promising to follow on in her own car.

Out of earshot of the other two, Captain Price said, "We need to be sure this isn't some extra-terrestrial hazing prank. Experimentation on humans and other animals isn't unknown after all, and heaven alone knows what social cues they might have misinterpreted from all those procedurals we're casually beaming into space. This could be an episode of Law and Order: Mars for all I know."

"This isn't the Ice Warriors' style," Martha said, but she agreed to check them over and report. Price intended to have a forensic team run over the house; she'd already called them in.

The ambulance pulled away, and Martha said her goodbyes, hurrying to her car, not wanting traffic to delay her too much. She was in the driver seat, turning the keys, when her mobile trilled, startling her into banging her knees on the dash. Cursing under her breath, she tugged it out and was lifting it to pick up the call when she had the sudden overwhelming certainty that it was coming from the house behind her, from one of those phones on the baths.

They're still here, she thought wildly. They're in the house with us!

Except she wasn't in the house, she was in the car and, anyway, that was stupid. Who was still there? Really. The phone trilled again and her heart jumped. Deliberately she pressed the connect button.

"Hello?"

There was a hiss. A crackle of static. Something that might have been her name at a distance.

"Hello?" Martha repeated. Before she could stop herself, she asked, "Is there anybody there?"

"It's me," said Tom, sounding tinny and far away. "I was checking you got to work okay. Where are you? The reception is crap."

Martha sighed in relief and then pretended she hadn't, because she was a doctor and she had travelled in space and time and spooking herself was definitely not the sort of thing she did. "I'm headed into Heartswood."

"What are you doing in Chiswick?" Tom asked and then, before she could speak, answered himself. "Never mind, UNIT business. Bad?"

"I don't know yet," she answered honestly. "I have to go; I'll call you."

"I'll get dinner in. Something we can reheat if aliens invade and you come home late." She could hear him grinning. "Oh, hey, some woman called for you, only she didn't say who she was, or what she wanted, or leave a message."

Martha snorted. "Well, thanks for that."

Tom laughed. "See you tonight. Love you."

"Love you too," she said, and he hung up. Martha went to do the same and her phone crackled. Static. Just static.

Damn it, he'd made her late again!

* * *

Heartswood had been in Chiswick since the 1850s, an ugly, grey stone building squatting in the shadows of Turnham Green. In 1944 it had received a glancing blow from a V-2 rocket which had quite possibly been the last time anyone tried to refurbish the place. Being gloomy and oppressive, full of tight corridors and unexpected rooms with too small windows -- all very dramatic -- some bright spark had thought to make it part of the National Health Mental Trust and UNIT had promptly co-opted it as somewhere to stash patients whose talk of aliens would be taken in stride as the ramblings of challenged people.

Refusing to be cowed by a building when she'd laughed in the Master's face, Martha held her head high as she strode through the perpetual twilight of Heartswood's car park. Her security card got her through reception, into the lifts, and then into the ward. After that, routine took over, moving the patients into beds, hooking them up to monitors, drawing blood for testing, doing a proper ultrasound to assess internal damage and confirm the missing organs and so on. X-Rays showed nothing she hadn't expected but the EEG proved oddly active. Finding the administrator, she talked him into letting her have half-an-hour on the MRI for comprehensive brain scans, to the annoyance of the neurology department who sent up a doctor to watch over her.

"Department politics," the man -- fifties, a military cut to his short brown hair, gold-wire framed glasses perched on his prominent nose, identified by his security badge as S. Khan -- assured her. "You won't know I'm here."

"Okay," Martha said, activating the scanner.

"Quiet as a mouse," he added, watching the screens for a moment, before leaning over her. "Hang on; you must have set it up wrong."

"No, that's just..."

They both looked at the screen, and then stood up to peer through the observation window at the supine form.

"Are you sure he's unconscious?" Khan asked.

"I was," Martha said, staring at the scanner data again. "It's like... I don't know what it's like. This is definitely motor control, right?"

Khan nodded. "He should be twitching like anything. Yet not even REM. Look, here, and here. That's optical." He tapped the screen with his pen. "And there, in the temporal lobe; all lit up like crazy when they should be practically black."

"The pontine tegmentum too. Sleep paralysis?" Martha suggested. "If he was really vividly dreaming... I need to get the medical histories, see if there's any history of narcolepsy."

"I don't think narcolepsy would explain these readings."

"It's like he's trapped in a state of hypnagogia," Martha said. "Neither awake nor asleep, but right there on the edge between."

Khan considered. "Have you had blood work done? I've actually seen very slightly similar reactions in people given strong doses of things like DMT."

"I sent samples downstairs to the lab, but they haven't come back with the results," Martha said absently, tapping keys to send the machine back for another, deeper pass.

"I can keep on here if you want to chase them," Khan offered. Off her look, he added, "Seriously, this is fascinating. I'll hold the room for you and everything."

"Won't you get in trouble?"

He chuckled. "I'll just blame you."

"Oh, cheers." She smiled anyway, standing to let him at the controls. "I'll be right back."

* * *

The lab was in the basement and contained only one technician amidst the equipment, jumping from machine to machine and barely looking up long enough to acknowledge Martha's presence. Keeping out of the way, Martha tracked down the reports on the blood she'd sent down and did the last few unfinished tests herself in a far corner of the lab. The results were not promising. There were signs of massive levels of neurotransmitters, which were interesting, but no traces of any of the common sedatives or psychotropic drugs. Of course, the initial drug could have been metabolised and something else could be keeping the patients sedated but it did Martha no good either way.

Her mobile buzzed, and she quickly turned it off, knowing it could affect the equipment. The technician started giving her dirty looks. Martha grabbed up all her papers and with a quick word of apology headed out. She read over the reports as she climbed the stairs to the ground floor landing. Too many of the results were too normal, lacking any post-surgery artefacts, which was a bloody neat trick.

She reached for the left door; the right swung open and a woman breezed through. Martha caught a flash of blonde hair before a shoulder knocked into her, papers going everywhere, tumbling at her feet and through the doors.

"Oi!" she called. "Watch it!"

There was no reply, just the clack of high-heels racing away up the stairs.

"The nerve of some people," Martha muttered, picking the closest papers up.

The woman had seemed vaguely familiar, hospital staff perhaps. The urge to chase after her, or report her to admin, was strong, but also petty; there was no need to take her frustrations at medical oddities out on strangers.

Pushing through the doors, she reached down for the next dropped paper, and all the lights went out, plunging her into semi-darkness. She blinked, trying to adjust her eyes to the dim grey light from the distant front doors. Before she'd taken another step, they came back up again, blazing brighter than before. When she threw up a hand to protect her eyes from the glare, her papers went flying again.

"Blimey!" said a young voice off to her left. "Oh, my head!"

The light slowly returned to normal and Martha, blinking away after images, made out a teenager in red and black robes rubbing at a mass of mousey-brown hair.

"Alright?" she asked, ducking to grab her papers again.

"Huh?" He stared at her, and then abruptly bounded over, grabbing up papers as well. "Yes, sorry, here; these are yours, then?"

"Thanks." They soon collected the rest and she stood, taking the ones he offered and adding them to her pile. This close, she realised that the boy, too, looked familiar. A little younger, maybe, and the hair darker, but the same eyes. Except that was ridiculous, because it had been eighty odd years (objectively speaking) since she'd seen-- "Tim?"

"Is that right?" he asked, confusing her before she realised he was looking over her shoulder at the clock-calendar above the reception desk.

"I think so," Martha said, hefting the papers one-handed, so she could check her watch. She was running a couple of minutes slow, but near enough. "Are you--?"

When she looked up again, it was to find the boy already half-way to the exit.

"Sorry," he called back, "but I'm really early!" The doors banged open and closed and he was gone.

"Right, then," Martha said. That had been weird. And possibly she had just let one of the mental patients run out because, seriously, who wore robes in this day and age? She made a mental note to ask somebody -- the receptionist appeared to have vanished -- and headed back up the stairs.

Puzzling over a notation in the corner of one of the pages (3W:3) she pushed open the door to the MRI control room with her shoulder, calling out "I'm back."

There was no reply. The lights were dim, though there was a bright blue glow coming from the testing chamber, through the observation window and the half-open interior door. Dropping the papers on the desk, she crossed to the window. Doctor Khan was inside with her back to her. She raised her hand to knock on the glass and stopped before she did. The bed of the MRI was empty. The student was in the corner. Standing in the corner, with his back to her.

The blue glow got brighter, then dimmer, then brighter again. It wasn't regular, like a pulse, but there was a pattern to it, a cadence, almost familiar.

Backing away from the window, Martha crossed to the test chamber door as quietly as she could and pulled it gently shut. Something banged against it hard and she yelped, slamming the bolt closed. The bang came again, then silence. She edged away, following the wall, and stretched out her fingers to turn the intercom on.

"Doctor Khan?" she called. "Can you hear me? Is everything okay?"

There was no response. There was nothing. It felt like she'd stumbled out of a medical drama into a slasher movie. Any minute now, someone was going to say something stupid like 'I'll be right back'. Which she already had. Oh, god. Get a grip, Martha!

"Doctor?" she asked again, edging around more. The intercom crackled, and she jerked her hand back at the sudden spark of static, taking a stumbled step away, bringing her back in front of the window. She whirled.

Khan and the student were both there, pressed against the glass, their eyes open and rolled back. Their jaws dropped, letting out a dry, rustling, hissing sound, like a last breath escaping from a newly made corpse.

Martha's nerve broke and she sprinted for the door, hearing them start to beat on the window behind her. The corridor blurred by and she stumbled out into the stairwell, wanting nothing more than to go down, knowing she had to go up. There were three more students in the beds or, worse, up walking around. They were her responsibility.

She climbed the stairs quickly, taking them in twos, and pushed her way through the doors at the next landing. The lights were out in the corridor (of course) and the grimy glow from the slits of windows barely gave her a view of her own feet. She walked slowly up it, trailing a hand against the wall to count the doors as she passed. Two. Three. Four. (Were those new footsteps or just hers, echoing back at her in the tight space?) Five. Six. Seven.

There was an empty space where eight should have been and Martha fell in, bouncing off the doorframe. She caught it before she could go over completely, pulling herself back upright. The lights flickered and caught for a moment. All the students were up. They were facing away from her, except the lights flickered, and they somehow weren't. Their eyes were rolled up, their mouths open. The rustling, whispering sound crawled out of their throats like dusty insects, buzzing all around her. She backed away, and they came shuffling, shambling forward.

Everything has a rational explanation, she told her self. Everything. Zombies, vampires, and ghosts are just stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the unknown. Do something!

"Hello? Can you understand me?" She found herself out in the corridor. "I need you to all lie down in the beds. Can you hear me?"

They came on, and she dodged forward, grabbed the door, and slammed it shut, only then noticing that the lock required a key. The door rattled. A hand smacked against the small glass window in it.

"Stay," she yelled, doing the exact opposite, and bolted back down the corridor, bouncing off the walls before she crashed through the door and back into the stairwell.

Something buzzed. For a moment, Martha expected the lights to go again, but it was coming from her pocket. She reached in and pulled out her mobile. The screen was dark. Still, the phone buzzed again.

"But I turned you off!" she told it. It just buzzed. Martha cautiously pressed the button and raised it to her ear. "H-hello?"

A burst of static became the rustling noise and she yelped and dropped the phone. It clattered against the railing, falling back towards her. It beeped when it hit the ground, then again, a staccato pattern. Bih-bih-bih-bum. Bih-bih-bih-bum. Bih-bih-bih-bum. She kicked out, sending it skidding between the railing bars, tumbling out into open space and down, chiming all the way. Bih-bih-bih-bum. Bih-bih-bih-bum. Bih-bih--

A door below crashed open. Something banged against the door beside her.

She went up the stairs again, as fast as she could, and across a couple of landings without slowing. The next door she took, meaning to cross into the residency block and take the other stairwell down. It was dark inside; she fumbled to her side, fingers finding a fire extinguisher and no light switch. There was an emergency lever, though, and she pulled that.

Alarms started wailing, above and below her, and emergency strip-lights lit up all down the corridor, revealing Brown and Chavez standing about halfway down it.

"Am I glad to see you!" Martha called, hurrying towards them. They didn't move. She slowed, feeling something twist in her gut. "Brown? Chavez?"

Their faces were in shadow.

Martha stopped, started backing up. "This is mad."

There was a dry chuckle. "We're all mad here," Brown said, except it didn't sound like him at all.

"Didn't you know?" Chavez asked, but it was the same voice as Brown's coming from her throat.

They both suddenly came forward, a shambling charge, but Martha snatched up the extinguisher, pulling the safety cord free in the same move, swinging it towards them as she squeezed the handles. Foam burst from the nozzle, driving them back. Martha backed through the door and then slammed it, jamming the canister against it. She took the stairs again, going up though she was running out of building.

Should have gone down in the first place, she told herself. Think! Fire! There was an emergency stairwell down the outside of the building, for use in fire. Yes!

Brown and Chavez broke out onto the stair below her. Below them, Khan and the students were coming up. Martha lengthened her stride, glad she'd kept in shape after the year that never was, pushing her way up the stairs and through the last door. She needed a window, something she could see out of and find where the fire escape was. Trying each door as she came to it, she ducked her head in. The first two were useless, and while the view was clear from the third, there was no sign of her exit. Leaving that side as bust, she started up the next.

One door jiggled under her hand. Another push and it slipped open an inch before catching. Martha put her shoulder to it and heaved and it burst inwards. She caught a glimpse of rolled up eyes, ducked automatically; hands swiped over her head and she threw herself back into the corridor. It was the bloody receptionist. That just wasn't fair.

Neither was Brown breaking into the other end of the corridor, the gang pushing in behind him. Instinct got her feet moving before her brain could. There was no way forward or back, but there were still doors, and she threw herself at one. It opened. She slammed it behind her, grabbing a chair and wedging it in place, then grabbing one of the wheeled beds, kicking the brake off, and shoving it up against the door as well. Only then did she turn around to check where she had holed herself up in, and gasped in shock.

Occupying the far corner of the room was a big blue Police box.

Martha darted across the room and banged on the door. To her delight, it opened. Beaming, she bounded inside, calling out, "Doctor! You have no idea how happy I am to see--"

The person wearing the familiar coat wasn't the Doctor she knew. For one thing, the Doctor wasn't female, and he was probably a good few inches taller, and a pale, ridiculously skinny thing, whereas this was a healthily solid South Asian looking woman. The light brown overcoat didn't really go with the cream linen pantsuit worn beneath it.

"--you," Martha finished.

"Martha Jones!" The woman beamed at her. "How lovely to see you again! It's me! The Doctor!"

"Doctor who?" said Martha. The woman nodded. Martha stared. "Oh, you're kidding me. Don't be ridiculous."

"I regenerated!"

"I can see that," Martha said. "You're a woman!"

"Am I?" She looked down. "Goodness gracious me, so I am! Hah!"

"...right," said Martha, coming up to the console. "Look, the thing is, there are these people outside, right, who are sort of... Well, they're zombies. I think it might be some kind of parasite, because I was assuming something was taken out of them, but maybe something was put in or someone infected them with something or, I don't know. But we have to do something!"

"Well, of course we do! There are ruptures in space-time, holes in the very fabric of Creation! Horrible things are leaking in from terrible places, and we need to plug them up! Hand me that hammer."

Bemused, Martha did.

"Massive temporal experiments started for good reasons have gone hideously wrong, as these things do, and so we must fix it! Preferably without regenerating again, I'm running out of these things and I'm still not ginger. Terrible!" She whacked the console with the hammer and the time rotor began to rise and fall. "Come on, Martha. The game's afoot!"

As they started to dematerialise, the Doctor added, "And probably lots of other body parts as well."


	4. PART THREE: DONNA

Tick. Tick. Tick.

The indicator was stuck again. Stupid car. It hadn't been the same since Sylvia Noble had insisted on getting rid of that sat-nav thing. Donna glared at the dash. Granddad had been weird about it, so she guessed he and her mother had come to words (and quite possibly blows, she wouldn't put it past her mother), but they both refused to talk about it. Bad as each other, really. She wiggled the wheel a bit and then, when that had no effect, tried banging on the dash with her fist. Should keep a hammer in the car; that would keep it right.

The engine coughed pathetically as she tried to pull away; the car trundled into the junction and came to a halt. Horns started blaring behind her. The indicator kept ticking, although it couldn't seem to make its mind up if it wanted her to go left or right. Donna turned the engine off, took a deep, calming breath, turned the engine back on, let the breath out when it caught, and then wound the window down, leant her head out and yelled "Oi! Keep your bloody hair on!" She grinned at the fresh round of horn blasts and edged the car forward, ignoring the people trying to go around her.

London beeped, roared, rumbled, ticked, spluttered, coughed, clattered, and rang all around her, mostly because you couldn't shove that many people in that small a space without them getting on each other's nerves as much as humanly possible. Donna supposed she would miss it if it was gone, or she was, but sometimes she could do without it. She could definitely do without this car. Transport that ran smooth, was it really too much to ask for?

Another half-a-mile of confusing the hell out of other motorists by indicating every direction at once and Donna made the mistake of thinking she would actually get all in the way into work, at which point the engine promptly stalled again. Cursing, she managed to wrestle the car to the curb -- okay, onto it, but whatever -- and hit the hazard lights, which just turned off the indicators all together.

It was seriously way, way, way too early in the day for this.

Horns sounded again as vehicles either edged cautiously around her (cars), slammed past so close she could feel the car shake (bikes, taxis), or just simply stared down the opposite lane until they were let through (buses, coaches, women doing the school run). Great. Just great. Donna dug in her purse for her mobile. Her mother would moan. Well, no, she wouldn't, because she'd been acting weird ever since Veena had been talking about planets in the sky. Sylvia would just get all pursed-lipped and twitchy-eyed and Donna really wasn't one for passive-aggressiveness. Aggressive-aggressive she could do, like when, for instance, someone tapped on her window while she was trying to dig the AA card out of a glove compartment filled with star charts ("Thank _you_ , Granddad!") and she slammed the central locking on and snapped out "I have mace!" before she'd even thought of looking.

The man -- black, late twenties / early thirties, shaved stubble for hair and beard -- just grinned in an easy-going sort of way. He looked relaxed but alert, in a way that made Donna briefly think of soldiers and then of this nice Irish policeman she'd dated (shagged) once (well, twice, well, five times) except he turned out to be a mechanic, and Donna was pretty sure you didn't get crime-fighting mechanics. If you did, she'd certainly missed out.

"It's probably your electrics," he said, showing her his card. "Pop the bonnet; let me have a look."

The card said his name was Ricky Simmonds and he worked for Clancy's Garage, although his van (parked behind her, blocking the whole pavement, so now they were angering pedestrians _and_ drivers) was blue, not the white she'd expect, and unmarked.

"Come on," Ricky cajoled. "No fee. It'll save on your insurance."

"Is this some kind of scam?" Donna said. "I have mace!"

"Really?"

Donna waved her key-ring spray-can at him. "It's pepper spray. It'll still bloody hurt, though."

"Fair enough." Ricky grinned. "It's not a scam."

"Is it a come-on?" Donna asked. "Because I've got no use for a man who reckons he can sweep me off my feet just by doing stuff for me. The last one stiffed me at the altar."

"I'm pretty sure I'm never going to do that," Ricky said.

Cars beeped as they worked their way by, traffic slowly increasing. Donna glared at them, sighed, and turned back to Ricky. "Go on, then. Do your mechanical thing." After a bit of rummaging, she found the lever that unlocked the bonnet and it popped up a couple of inches. Ricky walked around and pushed it the rest of the way up, blocking Donna's view. She considered leaning out of the window to watch, but a taxi rushing past close enough that her wing-mirror wobbled decided her against it. Drumming her fingers on the wheel occupied her for all of thirty seconds, and pointlessly redoing her make-up took care of another minute; after that she just fidgeted, bored, while occasional clanks, bangs and muffled curses came from in front of her.

It felt like a long time, but it was probably only five minutes or so (four minutes, twenty-eight seconds) before the bonnet went back down and Ricky was wondering up to her window, wiping his hands on an oily rag (really, doesn't that just make them dirtier?) and looking smug.

"Go on then," he called. "Give her a go."

Donna gave him a dubious look, but she turned the keys. The car started instantly and smoothly, practically purring. The indicators stayed off (and came on correctly, and went off again). Even the electric windows worked.

"Told you," Ricky said.

"Not bad," she agreed, matching his grin.

"Someone's done a right botch job on that engine. I reset the contacts, and the alternator needed a--" In the face of her polite blank look, he broke off. "...if I told you, would you even begin to understand?"

"Probably not," said Donna cheerfully. "Can't even get my DVR to work properly. I tried to get it to record Doctors last week; I get fifteen hours of Home and Away and a documentary on the Richard Hawkings fellow instead. Home and Away, can you believe it?"

"I've always been a Westenders man myself," Ricky said. "Or even Eastenders, which is obviously what I meant to say there. Here, look, that was only a stopgap thing. You really need to get the whole engine overhauled. Needs a bit of work. Here--" He offered her his card again. "We're open all hours."

Donna nodded, cracking the window enough so she could take the card. "So it is a scam. 'Needs a bit of work.'"

"That's not a scam," Ricky said, affronted. "Customer service is what it is. That's, like, marketing."

"Like drug peddling," Donna suggested. "First hit's free."

"Yeah, you got me. You've seen through my cunning plan." He grinned. "I get the engine running for nothing and then, six months from now, you beg to buy a Ferrari."

"Like I'd drive a Ferrari," Donna scoffed. "I'd get something vintage, twenties style. Or a Limo and have someone else drive me around." A bus blared past, drowning out his reply, but she smiled anyway, mostly because he had a cute grin. "Thanks. Thank you -- for fixing the alternating contact thingies."

"No problem," he said. "Give us a call if you want the car looked at properly. Or any garage, get a second opinion, see how much better our quotes are."

He grinned, and she laughed, nodding, and he gave a little wave as went back to his van. Flicking the indicators on (hah, take that) Donna pulled out into the traffic. Glancing up at the rear-view mirror, she noticed him watching her go, sat still in the cab of the van. There was something about his expression, almost sad, but sunlight turned the window opaque before she could make it out and, anyway, she needed her gaze on the road ahead, because black cabs just drove wherever they liked.

"Keep to your own bloody lane!"

It turned out that Ricky had fixed the horn too. Brilliant!

* * *

Technically, Donna worked for a quasi autonomous non-governmental organisation, commissioned by Health and Wellbeing Directorate as part of some Social Services Oversight thing on behalf of the British Medical Association and, if you tried, you could fit a few dozen more groups in there, but in practice Donna was still basically a temp. She went into a hospital (or a hospice, health trust, nursing home, et cetera, et cetera), collated all their records together, and boiled them down into a nice neat package of summaries and statistics. Every few weeks, she was moved onto the next et cetera, and she did it all over again.

Sometimes, it meant people got extra money, which was nice. Sometimes it meant they got visits from the tiny, sharp-eyed accountant and then fired for hiring fifty janitors with the same name which was occasionally satisfying but often depressing. And sometimes the people fudging the employee records were the people who really needed the money and were being refused it for stupid reasons, like there being no profit in poor, sick people, which wasn't nice at all, and so, sometimes, Donna's reports were not quite so thorough as she could have made them. Anyway, once they stopped being sick, there was a good chance they would also stop being quite so poor, which meant more taxes, so, really, she was helping the government out and not actually aiding and abetting fraud. It was just a story really, with words and numbers, yes, but she'd always had an eye for the little details and there were ways and ways a story could be told.

Pain sparked in the back of her head, and she rubbed her temples with the heels of her hand until it went away. Another commonality of these places was the tendency for the records offices to be pokey little holes with dingy, flickering lights and not enough sockets. Heartswood was the worst, grim, dreary and enclosed, like they had gone out of their way to make it as small as possible on the inside. Someone had decided to put forty-watt bulbs in sockets designed for a hundred or try and force strip lighting on circuits that had been in place since electricity had been invented (discovered), which meant you spent all your time straining to see. No wonder she kept getting headaches. No bloody medical benefits either, which was clearly someone having a laugh.

She'd tried co-opting one of the empty wards, but the administrator, a droopy little man with no chin whose name she could somehow never remember, had ever so apologetically explained they were being held for some big high military muck-a-mucks and couldn't be used. When she'd gone ahead and used them anyway, a much less apologetic woman in a Captain's hat had ordered her out and posted guards to keep her out, as if Donna didn't know when she wasn't wanted. Admittedly, often when she did know, she kept on anyway, but it was the principle of the thing.

Still, that had been a few weeks ago, now (seventeen days) and she was almost done with the records. The hospital kept them surprisingly well, a military holdover, perhaps; they made for rather depressing reading. The mental health trust that occupied the non-yes-sir-salute-sir-have-a-gun-sir part of the building did their best, but staff turnover was something rotten and they kept losing patients to Care in the Community schemes. As far as Donna could see, all Care in the Community got you was no care and no community, and she'd tried explaining this to Nameless the Administrator once. He'd just sighed and told her that she was missing the big picture. The whole NHS was a teetering pack of cards, wobbling all over the place. Just fixing one card would bring the whole thing down.

Donna personally thought one card was a good place to start. It gave you something to help hold up the next card you fixed.

Her headache was still lingering a little, and she decided to go and get herself a hot drink from the vending machine. The best bit about hospital 'coffee' was that it was so incredibly bad it motivated you to get your work done faster so that you could go home and have a proper cuppa. Also, it made you not want to drink coffee, like aversion therapy, so she had cut down majorly from when she was having three a day (stupid Lance), although possibly that was another source of the headaches. Doctors surrounded her; she really should ask one of them about the effects of caffeine withdrawal.

Searching through her purse for change occupied Donna on the walk -- she had no idea why she'd bought something with so many pockets, she could never find anything -- so she barely noticed the lights flickering, nor the woman standing by the vending machine, looking up at them. When she reached up to put a coin in the machine, though, she noticed a cup already waiting to be collected, steaming slightly.

"Is this yours?" Donna asked.

The woman turned slowly to face her. She was attractive, in a pale, washed out sort of way. Donna thought that maybe she had seen the woman before, perhaps in a poster or on a TV screen; she was vaguely familiar. It was hard to tell. The woman's blonde hair, tied up haphazardly, stuck up or flopped down at random, and, this close, the blue jacket and sharp red high-heels she wore couldn't disguise the green hospital gown. For one thing, the colours clashed dreadfully.

"The coffee," Donna clarified, when the woman continued to look blankly at her. "Not that you can really call it coffee."

The woman considered this. "Why not? Does it object?" she asked. Received pronunciation, what they used to call BBC English, vaguely posh but tied to no particular place: a woman from anywhere.

"I would," Donna said, just to fill the gap. "Call a shovel a shovel, I say."

The woman smiled faintly. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't remember names."

"Donna," Donna supplied. "Donna Noble. I'm a temp here."

"Aren't we all?" the woman asked, her gaze drifting away from Donna. "All just here to go."

You could say little to that; at least, little that wasn't along the lines of "Cheer up, emo kid," which wasn't appropriate when addressing someone who potentially was clinically depressed. Donna offered the woman the coffee again instead. She accepted with a bland smile and almost inaudible thanks. Donna started feeding change into the machine to get her own.

"What brings you here, then?" Donna asked, and then winced, because that was just as bad.

"I found a world in a wardrobe and they made me part-Queen of the Quadripartite," the woman explained, in a quite reasonable tone. "They broke the lion on a slab but he came back again. They all came back again." She sipped her coffee and then pulled a face. "Oh, that really is dreadful."

"Sorry," said Donna. "I did say." Her own cup dropped into the holder. The vending machine shuddered and click-click click-clicked. "This lion," she said, "his name wouldn't have been Aslan, would it?"

"Aslan?" the woman asked with a polite smile.

"You know," Donna said, waving a hand vaguely, "like in the film. Narnia and all that."

"Narnia." The woman smiled a bright, dazzling thing. "Do you know, I think I might be Susan."

"Hello, Susan," Donna said promptly, and they exchanged smiles. Twin streams filled her cup. "I went to see Prince Caspian with a few of my mates. Not to sound like a dirty old woman or anything, but that Caspian was a nice bit of jail-bait totty." 

Susan nodded and said, "They dammed the Volga. The sea is shrinking."

"That's progress for you." To be honest, Donna had no idea what that had to do with anything, but she'd read somewhere that you were supposed to humour mad people. On the other hand, was it that you weren't supposed to humour them?

"Everything progresses," Susan agreed. She sipped her coffee and pulled a face again.

The vending machine spat milk-substitute into Donna's cup.

Susan sighed. "We were gone for so very long, you know, but it was only a day when we got back -- or did we leave for a day and return in a year? So much time, and so very little time at all. They all left."

Donna nodded in what she hoped was a sympathetic way, and worked her coffee out of the machine's clutches. It was hot enough to steam and warm her fingers through the thin plastic, but not proper boiling. Health and safety regulations, probably: wouldn't want people scalding themselves and then suing the NHS. Could you sue them for crimes against taste?

The silence got longer, and she groped around for something to say. "Terrible weather, lately."

"Avant nous, le dÉluge," Susan said, smiling a little. She lifted her cup, tilted her head back, drinking the rest in one, long, swallowing gulp, before handing the cup back to Donna who was too surprised not to accept it. A slow drip of coffee ran from the corner of Susan's mouth to her chin. "I have to go. It's almost time for his return."

Susan strode abruptly away with unexpected speed and a strange sort of unsteady grace, so that the hospital robe swirled around her and her heels beat out an imperfect rhythm on the vinyl floor tiles: ta-ta-tah-tap, ta-ta-tah-tap...

Donna frowned after her until she'd vanished through the far doors, and then looked down at the coffee cups in her hand. After a second, she put her filled cup into Susan's empty one, and chucked both into the handy bin. Turning the other way, she came face to face with the chinless administrator, darting out of a side-door and into the corridor, and they both jumped.

"Ms. Noble!" he said. "I'm dreadfully sorry!" He pulled a handkerchief out, patting at his forehead. "Oh, dear me. What a morning!"

"You seem a bit out of sorts," said Donna.

"First the military people phone in to say we're to receive some hush-hush arrivals, and now I'm afraid one of our long stay guests has gone off by herself and the orderlies don't seem to grasp that, while we are certainly not a prison, we really shouldn't be allowing potentially delusional patrons to wonder off into a building full of medicines and dangerous equipment and--"

"Alright," Donna interrupted. "Best to keep breathing, eh?"

"What? Oh, yes, quite right, quite right." He dabbed at his forehead again.

"Now, this patient of yours--"

"Guest," he corrected, "please."

"This guest," Donna said. "Blonde woman, about yay-big, coat and gown, calls herself Susan?"

"That sounds like her," he agreed. "I don't know about the Susan part. Last week she was Lenore. I've been reading these papers on the formation, acquisition and choice of personal address -- the things we ask people to call us, or we call ourselves, you understand. Well," he added, "obviously you're not a doctor, so-- I say; are you all right?" 

Donna nodded. "Fine, thank you."

"Headache? You were rubbing your--" He waved his hand vaguely at head height.

"It's been on and off all day," Donna said. "But, no, listen, this woman, I've seen her, just now. She went down that way. You only missed her by seconds."

"Oh!" He beamed. "Thank you! That way?" He started to head towards the doors, and then turned back. "If your head gets too bad, please, take the rest of the day off. Paid, of course."

Donna shook her head. "No, really, I'm fine--"

The overhead lights all went out. Donna blinked in the vending machine glow. She was promptly half-blinded as they came back on, blazing. Red-hot nails of pain hammered themselves into her skull.

"I don't believe it," whined the administrator. "I've told them and told them to fix those generators, I really have."

The lights flickered, and buzzed, and flickered.

"Yeah," said Donna. "You know what? I think I will go home, thanks." 

He nodded sadly. "Yes, I thought you might. I would too, if I could. No rest for the wicked, I suppose. Toodle-pip."

* * *

It was a testament to the pain in her head that Donna was actually opening the door to her home before it occurred to her to wonder who said 'Toodle-pip' these days. Thankfully, her mother was out, and her grandfather took one look at her and insisted she go and have a nice lie-down, and he'd come up later to bring her a cup of tea. Shutting the curtains, she hung up her jacket and stretched out on her bed in the murky half-light, closed her eyes, and _finds herself walking down a grass-lined avenue between thick green hedges that stretch above her. Big, bright flowers skirt the base of the living walls and they start to wiggle and sing as she passes. She can't hear them, but she knows they are singing. Through the green, she catches glimpses of something blue. There is a light flashing. Every time she tries to turn towards it, the path takes her away._

_It's not a maze, she thinks, it's a labyrinth. There is only one route, and it always leads to the centre._

_She turns left, always left._

_There are two men, twins, she supposes, one in brown and one in blue but otherwise the same. They are in the path, arguing with each other. She can't hear the words, but she can see their hands fly and their faces gurn. When they see her, they both stop abruptly, and then one grins and the other looks sad, like those masks they have at theatres, dramedy and coma._

_Charlie Chaplin waddles by. He has thin squares of processed cheese on his shoulders._

_That's just derivative, she says, except she can feel the words on her lips but not hear them in her ears, which are still there, she checks. The twins in their twee suits both try to talk but they're doing dumb and dumber and she can't seem to make out what they're trying to mouth and they don't seem to follow her hand gestures. The flowers are all melting into the hedges, the hedges into the sky. The twins take her hands, one each, and take each other's hand, how that even works she has no idea, can't even program her VCR, not that she has one, because she just grabs all her shows off the torrent sites and watches them with the adverts cut out on her granddads laptop (still no webcam) and this sentence is too long. The twins take her hands, is the point. And they run._

_Fast as they can, just to stay where they are._

_The blue thing glints through the green. Glint, glint, glint, glint. They run, and it glints. It glints, and they run. Donna trips over a clockwork mouse with a charred nose. The twins fall away and she runs, oh, how she runs, but they never get closer, and now she can hear something but it's just the pounding of her heart in her ears._

_A girl comes towards, dressed up in finery, with a pinafore over it. It's Alice, she thinks. Alice in her crown, except that's from_ Looking Glass _not_ Wonderland, _which is poor continuity. You have to keep track of these things or suddenly you have facts and figures scattered all over the place and dates and times and hospitals are being closed and doctors go missing and someone puts a big dent in the nineteen-eighties, which certainly wasn't her, no, sir._

 _The twins are arguing again, and her heart's pounding in her head, and she tries to point them towards Alice, but they don't seem to care, they don't seem to see, and for all Donna shouts, she lets out not a single word, just a sound, the ringing sound of her hearts, deep and boom-chiming, and she thinks, no, hang on, that's a bell, someone is_ ringing the doorbell. Groggy, Donna pushed herself up. The pain in her head had faded, mostly, but her tongue felt thick in her mouth and her muscles ached. The dregs of her dreams kept catching on her thoughts, sending them off at confused tangents. Stumbling a little in the half-dark, she let herself out of the room and padded down the stairs. Her grandfather was coming along the hall.

"I'll get it, sweetheart," he said. "It's probably just your mother, forgotten her keys again. You go rest."

"I'm feeling much better," insisted Donna, dodging past him to reach for the latch. Really, she just needed something to clear out the cobwebs and she would be fine; a bit of gossip or some new shopping catalogue or maybe that fit man with the strange American accent that had come to clean out their gutters that one time. "It's--"

She blinked at empty space.

"Donna!" exclaimed a young voice, and she looked down to find a short teenager in black and red robes looking up at her from under a mess of mousey-brown hair.

"That's me," she said. "Are you collecting for something?"

"I'm Dennis Creevey," he said portentously, "and I need you to help me save the world."

There was an expectant pause.

"If this is a religious thing, I have to say, up front, that we're all Methodists, and we don't hold with any of that cult malarkey," Donna said.

He frowned at her. "I don't think there are any horses involved, juvenile or otherwise!"

It was Donna's turn to stare. "Are you having me on?"

"No!" Dennis insisted. "The Doctor and I took the TARDIS to Terminus and there was some kind of transtemporal event and--"

Something white went off in Donna's head, then black, then red. While she was distracted, Dennis pushed himself past her, still talking, although Donna could only make out words here and there, corridor, and hospital, yellow pages, numbers and run. Wilf was talking over the top of it, louder and harder than she could remember; trying to make Dennis stop, make him leave.

"Stop it!" she yelled at the both of them. "Just stop it!"

They both looked at her in surprise.

"I don't know what your game is, sonny Jim, but--"

"It's Dennis," he said, "Dennis Creevey. We've met before, but you don't remember, but I need your help, because I'm stuck in the wrong century and I'm already here, probably, except if I am, I'm probably a decade older than I am now, and Blinivictual's Limitation Effect--"

"Blinovitch," Donna heard herself correct, as if from a great distance.

"No, no," Wilf said. "You can't tell her, not about him, not about any of it! You don't understand!"

"It's okay," said Dennis, rummaging in his pockets, "because, right, I have this!" He pulled out a glowing gold vial. "It's neuroenhancer! It buffers your system against neurological shock, allowing you to contain a multi-dimensional consciousness safely in your otherwise mostly human brain without it electrocuting itself and melting out of your ears and things! And I can re-modify your memory afterwards!"

"You -- are -- bonkers!" Donna forced out.

Her heart was beating in her head again. It was hard to breathe. The whole house was tilting in a very disconcerting manner. She pushed past the both of them, stumbling into the kitchen. The headache was back and it had brought all its friends and they were having a right rave-up inside her skull and, oh, god, she'd almost married a man who was having an affair with a giant spider-woman. The room went out from under her, and only her grandfather's presence of mind kept her from hitting the floor.

"Look what you've done," Wilf cried.

It sounded like he was a long, long way away. Had she gone under with Agatha Christie? There was a buzzing. Wasps or Dalek-treads? She couldn't think. She couldn't breathe. Parched, drying out, burning up, her head too small, too much in it, thick, she was thick, old and thick and full of stuff and stars and nonsense and she couldn't, she couldn't, and there were voices and someone was fumbling a glass against her lips, cool, so cool, and she swallowed and swallowed and swallowed until she was sure she would drown in the cool water and the bright song and the endlessly liquid light.

* * *

Clancy's garage was a small, backstreets sort of place. It made pretence at security, what with the CCTV camera and the padlock on the chain, but since the chain was hanging off an already open door and the garage was one, large, open space, it was hardly worth it. There was nothing to stop anyone who put their mind to it from just wandering right up to the man with his head inside the bonnet of a black SUV and making him bang his head by unexpectedly yelling, "Oi! Mickey the mechanic!"

"Ow! What?" He turned around, rubbing his head, and did a classic double take and gape. "Donna Noble!"

"Ohhh, yes!" she crowed.

"Did you come about your car?" He managed a smile. "I can fit it--"

"Bollocks to the car!" She grinned at him, flushed and full of life. "You know what they say about this world?"

He frowned at her. "No, what?"

"It. Is. Defended!"

Slowly, he began to grin.


	5. PART FOUR: MICKEY

Brand new life, Mickey had said, just you watch. Of course, that was before he learned that the council had occupied his flat, sold all his stuff at auction to cover the missed rent, and declared him legally dead. Sure, subjectively, he'd been away, what, five, six, seven years, but objectively it couldn't have been more than one, right? Right. Bastards. The government was never that quick off the mark when they owed you money.

"But I knew a guy who knew a thing who knew a guy," Mickey explained, as he lead Donna and Dennis around cars on hydraulics and into the small office. "So I wrangled myself up a new ID -- centralised governmental databases don't half make fraud easier -- and I did some car work to build myself up some cash, right? Using stuff I learnt on the parallel Earth--"

"With the robot people and the hot air balloons!" Dennis said, nodding.

"Riiight," said Mickey, pulling a massive set of keys out of his jacket. "Who are you, again?"

"He says his name is Cravey," Donna said. "I don't remember him yet."

"Time Lord Consciousnesses are very big and human brains are very small," Dennis explained. "Also, it's Creevey."

"Close enough," said Donna.

"What, as in, Colin?" Mickey asked, bemused.

"That's my brother," Dennis said. "I'm Dennis! Shouldn't be we be going back to Heartswood Hospital?"

Mickey stared at him in disbelief, and then he stared at Donna in disbelief for good measure.

"Yeah, I know," Donna said, "but he was carrying a vial of something we won't even seriously consider inventing until we discover rather inventive ways around the blood / brain barrier about fifty years from now."

"Huh," said Mickey. "Anyway, people got interested in the engine designs I was using, which is how--" He inserted a small copper coloured key into an all but invisible slot in the desk and turned it three times. "--I came to find the Mister Copper Foundation."

(Strictly speaking, Mister Copper had turned up on the doorstep of Mickey's please-dear-god-be-temporary bedsit and asked him if he wanted a job doing Torchwood/UNIT like things without actually having to be part of any Torchwood/UNIT like things, which, with all due respect to Captain Beefcake, no. Mickey had said yes immediately and only then thought to check the man wasn't an alien bent on world domination.)

"I knew there was weirdness going on," Mickey added, snatching the key back as the desk started sinking into the ground. "You get a nose for these things."

"Not a literal nose," Donna said quickly. Dennis closed his mouth.

Sections of the desk sank further, forming a steep stair. Mickey led them down into a large, brightly lit space full of equipment-covered tables, both human and alien technology. Off Donna's questioning look, he shrugged. "I've always been good with my hands." To Dennis, he continued, "You turned up in Heartswood?"

"Yep!" Dennis nodded. "First I was on Terminus which is the middle of the universe in the future, and then we were all running, and then there was a big whirling flashy thing and a big bumpy ride, like being on an out of control broomstick, and then I was here!"

He reached out to touch something flashy and covered in buttons and Donna rapped his knuckles.

"Sounds like a time-corridor," Donna said.

"Time corridors? That's Dalek technology," Mickey said.

Donna shook her head. "It's just like building a bridge. Once it's up, anyone can cross it."

"Heartswood is a UNIT hospital."

"I know. I happen to work there."

Mickey frowned at her. "That's a bit weird, isn't it?"

"Well, that depends," Donna said. "Aren't you all keeping an eye on me?"

"Yeah, that's weird too," Mickey admitted. "It was coincidence this morning. I mean, Jack might be watching you, but I was just on my way to work. I didn't recognise you until after I stopped."

"Almost contrived, you might even say," Donna suggested.

They both considered the implications of this.

"Chocolate frog?" Dennis offered, holding out a paper bag.

"...they move," Mickey said.

"That's the best bit!" Dennis insisted, waving the bag at him.

"Don't mind if I do," Donna said, nabbing one out and biting the back legs off. "Bugger the diet."

Mickey took one rather more dubiously. "I really don't like Daleks, especially crazy, dead, prophetic Daleks."

"Pepper pots of DOOM!" Dennis agreed, throwing his arms up in emphasis, which sent a handful of chocolate frogs bouncing and hopping across the table. "Oops, sorry!"

He started digging into the equipment to get them back before they could stop him. Frogs and stray elbows knocked into buttons, setting things whirring and bleeping and, in one particular spot, popping, bursting into flames, and then smoking. Mickey yelped, grabbing up a small fire extinguisher and firing it at the table, covering it and Dennis in powder.

"I've got them," Dennis announced, bouncing back to his feet with his hands clapped together, and shook himself off like a dog, powder going everywhere. He opened his fingers carefully, trying to separate the frogs from the handful of electronics without losing them. "No, no, I've got it, hang on--"

"Is that--?" Donna snatched the cylinder from Dennis's hands, sending the frogs flying again. "You've got a sonic-screwdriver!"

"How do you think I fixed your car?" Mickey said.

"Awww," said Dennis sadly, looking around. "Bye, bye froggies!"

"Bit primitive," Donna said. "Still, soon sort that out."

"Reverse-engineered from some sonic pen Torchwood found," Mickey said. "Seriously, who leaves alien technology in a bin?" 

Donna, fiddling, ignored this.

Mickey asked, "So, what's the plan? Break into the hospital, fight the monsters, send frog-boy home, close the wormhole, down the Red Lion for beer and chips?"

"I am home," Dennis complained. "I'm just a few years out of..." His eyes went big. "Ooh! Technically I'm over-age in this time!" He pulled his wand from his sleeve and waved it at the room. " _Accio_ frogs!"

Mickey stared as the frogs popped out from between coils, resisters, pipes and circuits and smacked into Dennis's waiting hand.

"Oi!" Donna snatched the wand from Dennis's hand.

"Hey!" Dennis complained.

"No spells!" Donna insisted. Dennis pouted. Donna glared.

Mickey tried, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?"

"Any sufficiently arcane magic is indistinguishable from technology," Donna said.

"Yeah, but, right, wizards don't exist. Right?"

"That's right," said Dennis, nodding. "And if they did exist, which they don't, the International Statute of Secrecy would prevent me from telling you about them! May I have my wand back now, please?"

"No," said Donna, slipping it into her jacket along with Mickey's sonic-screwdriver. She ignored Dennis's continued pout and added, "I like your plan," to Mickey. "Let me just get a few things together out of this lot, and you can drive us to the hospital."

* * *

Hospitals in general gave Mickey the creeps, and dark, gloomy, strangely empty ones were just rubbing it in. It was at times like this that he wished he'd kept the huge guns. The slim-line, multi-shot stunner wasn't a good substitute and it still earned him disapproving looks from Donna. He tried carefully sweeping the entrance, keeping low and in the cover, but his companions just breezed right past and opened the door.

"This never happened when I worked for Torchwood," he lied, following them in.

There was no receptionist on the desk. Donna tssked. "Typical. And no little shop either."

"I think I appeared about, um." Dennis wandered around the reception for a bit. "Or, no, maybe it was-- Or was it--"

Mickey sniffed. There was something in the air, under the usual hospital smells of sick and antiseptic: a hint of ozone, a touch of hot metal. It was almost, but not quite, like the scent the TARDIS left behind when it dematerialised.

"Definite chronal displacement activity," Donna said, pulling her - his - the, Mickey compromised, pulling out the sonic screwdriver and pointing it at various bits of air. "Can't quite get a fix, though."

"I don't think you can just unscrew the air," Dennis said.

"Hypersonic refraction is measured by slight changes in pressure resistance," Donna said and then, off Dennis's blank look, added, "It's sort of like a divining rod, except it's metal and I'm looking for flows of time, not water."

"Are you sure you arrived in this room?" Mickey asked.

"Yes!" Dennis nodded. "Probably. I think." They both looked at him. "There were lots of flashing lights and I was very dizzy."

"So, no, then." Mickey sighed. There were three sets of doors, one leading into the stairwell, one into what seemed to be the administration offices, and one into this floor's wards. He pushed these last open, peering through the windows beyond. "I don't think there's anyone down here."

"Maybe they went to the seaside," Dennis suggested, squeezing around him to wander down the corridor. "They do trips for sick people, don't they?" He stood on tiptoes to look through the windows.

Mickey had done some volunteer work like that himself, but those trips had just been for kids, and he didn't think Heartswood was the sort of place that did that for adults. He followed Dennis, also looking. Each of the rooms had two beds done up proper with hospital corners and everything, separating curtains pushed back. There were occasional half-eaten bowls of grapes and the like to suggest previous habitation, but the occupants could just as easily have been gone for weeks as hours. Everything was very still, very static. There was oddness to the place that Mickey couldn't put his finger on. Perhaps the only odd thing was how similarly normal every room was, one set with grapes, one set without. He found himself suddenly thinking of old Scooby Doo cartoons, of flat people running down endlessly looped backgrounds.

"Hey," said Dennis, "come and look at this!"

The last of the rooms differed from the others only in that there was a row of large plastic flowers with smiling faces on the windowsill.

"Tacky," said Mickey, poking one.

"They were moving before," Dennis complained. He fiddled with one of the pots and then jumped backwards at a sudden burst of static.

Mickey opened his mouth to ask if Dennis had broken the thing and kept it open as a very tinny version of 'I Am the Walrus' started playing and all the flowers started weaving awkwardly from side to side. Revising his opinion from 'tacky' to 'creepy', Mickey backed away, pulling Dennis with him. That the flowers seemed to turn their heads to follow them as they went was, he assured himself, entirely coincidence, although that didn't stop him slamming the door closed behind them.

"What," Dennis started, and then there was a cry from reception and they both said "Donna!" and ran back up the corridor.

Mickey reached the door first, though Dennis was gamely following, and he went through it without stopping, trying to cover the entire room with his stunner at once. Donna just rolled her eyes at him.

"This is Susan," she said, waving a hand at the blonde woman by her side. "I think I gave her a bit of a scare with the sonic screwdriver."

"Er. Hi?" Mickey said, quickly hiding the stunner behind his back. She smiled faintly at him, absently touching her hair.

"Hello!" said Dennis cheerfully, barging right up to her and sticking his hand out. "I'm Dennis Creevey!"

She blinked at him slowly. "Are you? Why?"

"My dad says my mum really liked the guy from the Beach Boys," Dennis said, letting his hand drop.

Susan quirked a smile at him. "Dennis the Menace."

"I liked Gnasher best," Dennis said. He turned towards Donna and added, in a poor attempt at a conspiratorial whisper, "Shouldn't we be looking for You-Know-Who and the You-Know-What? I mean, not You-Know-Who, You-Know-Who. The Who You Know."

"We are," Donna agreed, which was good because Mickey wasn't sure he'd actually followed that.

"All the rooms are empty," Mickey said.

"They all went up," said Susan. "Happy thoughts make you fly."

"Levitation charms don't actually work like that," Dennis said and then yelped when Donna reached out without looking and cuffed the back of his head. "Well, they don't!"

Susan chuckled. "We're all mad here. Didn't you know?"

"Maybe we should check the other floors?" Mickey said, carefully ignoring this.

Donna aimed the sonic-screwdriver at the floor, and then the ceiling. "Up, I reckon."

"Did you find time-travel tracks?"

"No, but there's only one floor below us and there are loads above, so, probabilistically speaking." She turned on her heel and strode across the room, shoving the doors to the stairwell open. "Come on, then!"

Dennis followed promptly after and Susan did too, with rather less bounding, and Mickey brought up the rear, which very much confirmed Susan was only wearing a hospital robe under that jacket. Averting his eyes, he caught sight of something on the landing.

"Hang on," he called, and Donna and Dennis both looked back from halfway up the stairs. "I think someone dropped their phone. It's--"

The screen was cracked, but it came to life in his hands, sparking and beeping and _it's not like a vision. It's more like suddenly remembering something he's read. He's standing in the TARDIS, facing Martha Jones, who is saying, "but I was thinking, what if they had something put_ into _them?"_

_"Very good point!" he says, except it isn't his voice, and the hand that reaches for the controls is smaller than his, lighter, and has much better nails._

_"Things didn't start getting really weird until after we'd put the first of the patients into the MRI," Martha continues. "It's like we ... turned them on, or something."_

_"I wonder,"_ Mickey said.

"Wonder what?" Dennis asked.

Mickey blinked at them. "I was just in the TARDIS! But in my head! Talking to Martha Jones about an MRI."

"That's called a memory," Dennis said. "I remember being in the TARDIS in my head as well."

Mickey glared at him. "No, I was there. It was really happening. But it wasn't me, it was someone else."

"Chronal instability? No." Donna frowned. "Wait, no; no... Yes!" She grinned. "Dennis, the experiments on Terminus. Reverse biotemporal fields!" Dennis nodded. "See, because, we've all travelled in the TARDIS -- well, not you," she added to Susan, "but the rest of us, and we picked up background artron energy. Now there's artron energy leaking into the present through the corridor and that little electric boost created a brief connection between the two. You temporarily jumped chronal states, like... fluorescing." 

"Fluorescing," repeated Mickey dubiously. Dennis looked equally blank. Susan looked politely attentive, although to the wall.

"You briefly reflected back an energy heavy timeline, which-- Oh," Donna said, smacking her forehead. "The river Volga feeds the Caspian sea! Duh!" Mickey and Dennis stared at her. She waved them off. "That's not important right now."

"I think the neuroenhancer might be wearing off," Dennis said. "You should give me my wand back in case I have to quickly modify your memory."

"The TARDIS alone wouldn't have that effect," Donna said, blatantly ignoring this. "It would require a massive source of raw energy."

"Like a thousand chocolate frog explosion?" Dennis asked.

"Echoing backwards through time," Mickey added. "Like with the reality bomb."

"What are you talking about?" Susan asked.

"I'm trying very hard not to make Terminus / terminal puns," Donna admitted.

"Hey," said Dennis, "there was a thing that looked like an MRI thing on Terminus as well."

Mickey and Donna exchanged looks. Donna shrugged. "Good a place to start as any, I reckon." He looked at her. "Why would I know where it is? I was working in human resources, not magnetology."

"It's just up here," said Susan. "Would you like me to show you?"

"Yes, please," said Dennis.

She offered him her arm, and he took, and they went up the stairs again. Sharing another look, Donna and Mickey followed afterwards. Just past the next landing, something clattered behind them, and Mickey looked back in time to see the doors burst open. He saw the doctor's coat first and was almost relieved until he looked up and saw, behind the gold-wire framed glasses, the flat whites of rolled up eyeballs. A dry, rustling sound came from the open mouth (not as if they were making it, but as if they were hollowed out and fitted with speakers) that put Mickey in mind of old, dusty books, falling to pieces as you tried to read them.

"Inferi!" Dennis yelled. "Kill them with fire!"

"They're not dead," Donna said, grabbing him. Mickey retreated as well, backing up the stairs and levelling the stunner at them. Donna's reassurance hadn't so much worked as made him think that, yeah, actually, they did seem a bit dead -- and as if they'd heard him think it, they came lurching forward, Romero-style.

"It's just the Duke of York's men," said Susan. "They're marching up the hill."

The dusty rustle came on louder as more and more people, most in hospital gowns, stumbled out onto the landing, filling the gap.

"When I say run," Donna said, and they ran, pulling a protesting Susan with them. At the next landing, Donna shoved Susan and Dennis through the doors. Mickey fired the stunner at the lead shambler. It had just as little an effect as he had expected. Donna pulled him through the doors, slammed them shut, and sealed them with the sonic-screwdriver.

"It's gone all Night of the Living Dead out there," Mickey said. "What does that have to do with time travel?"

"They weren't dead," Donna repeated.

"Oh! Oh!" Dennis bounced from foot to foot. "Maybe they've been possessed! Like with Geldof!"

"The Gelth," Donna corrected, following Susan who was wandering down the corridor, stopping every few steps to check her hair in the ward windows.

"So it's more Quatermass II?" Mickey offered. Off Dennis's blank look, he tried, "Okay, it's like that old-school episode of Professor X with Frankie Howerd and Dave Young and the Cybertrons." Dennis continued to look blank. "Invasion of the Body Snatchers?"

"I don't get to watch much television," Dennis said. "They don't work at school, and the Doctor only uses his to watch the cricket and reruns of The Middleman."

"I used to watch Professor X with my father," Susan said. "I had a little TASID and all the dolls."

"Action figures," Mickey corrected automatically.

With a heavy thud, the door shuddered.

"Staying locked isn't going to help much if the hinges break," Donna said.

"Where's she going?" Mickey asked, nodding at Susan, who had wandered off down the corridor.

"To find the MRI?" Dennis suggested, hurrying after her.

"Two postmen always ring four times," Susan announced as they followed.

"Good to know," Mickey muttered.

The wards were just as empty on this level, which was both good because they weren't filled with zombie patients, and bad because it probably meant there were zombie patients elsewhere, waiting for them. Constantly checking both sides meant Mickey spotted a 'Break In Case Of Emergency' sign.

"We should set off the fire-alarm," he said.

"So the Inferi will think there's a real fire and run away?" Dennis asked.

"They're not dead," Donna said.

"Mostly I was thinking it might distract them for a bit," Mickey said. "When the fire-men show up--"

"--they'll run right into the zombies!" Dennis complained.

"They're. Not. Dead!" Donna yelled.

"Look, if there is anyone in the building who isn't a zombie, they need to know to get out," Mickey said. He smacked the glass with butt of his stunner. There was a spark and _he's back in the TARDIS._

_"We can't go down," Martha says. "We're surrounded."_

_"Can't go over them, can't go under them, can't go through them," he says in that other voice. "Best to go around them."_

_"Are you sure you can do short-hops?" she asks._

_"Of course I can," he complains. "Who do you think you're talking to? Heh. 'Who do'. Don't worry, all I need to do is to lock onto the greatest local concentration of artron energy, which should be the end of the time corridor, and the TARDIS will take care of the rest, won't you,_ old girl," Mickey said.

"Oi!" said Donna. "Less of the old, thank you!"

"I was in the TARDIS again!" Mickey told her.

"What do you expect when you go around hitting things with a stun-gun? You're lucky you didn't zap your whole arm off. Poor weapons safety is another reason why I don't like people having guns," Donna huffed.

"I like wands; they're much better than guns," Dennis said, hopefully.

"You're still not having yours back," Donna said.

Dennis opened his mouth to complain and the doors at the entrance to the corridor cracked in half, crashing down in a cloud of dust and wood shavings.

"I didn't do it," Dennis said quickly.

"Right," said Donna, walking forward and raising her hands. "I am Donna Noble. We come in peace!"

There was no reply from the oncoming hordes, save that horrible rustling noise.

We are the hollow men, Mickey thought suddenly. Something Jake had read to him in a van once, lost somewhere in France. His stomach roiled as it always did when he thought of people he'd lost, and he made himself think about the poem instead. How had it gone? We are the stuffed men. Our dried voices, when / we whisper together / are quiet and meaningless.

Donna was still trying, although she was backing up, too. "Hello? Anyone in there?"

"Run!" said Mickey.

They did. Zombies or not, the shambling people were slow -- relentless steady, yes, but slow -- and Mickey and Donna easily outpaced them, pulling Dennis along, and catching up with Susan at the door to the radiology department.

"In there," Mickey said, pointing at the MRI sign, before going back to close the door behind them. While Donna got the MRI door open with the sonic-screwdriver, Dennis and Mickey pulled a handy desk over and wedged it against the door, chucking chairs on top of the makeshift barricade.

Susan just hummed to herself and jiggled on the spot in some half-coordinated dance.

"Got it," Donna announced, shoving the door open. "You know, these things aren't half handy."

"Just remember it's mine," Mickey said.

Donna ignored this, waving them in, and they crowded into the little observation room. She locked the door behind them, and Mickey started barricading it too, although there wasn't that much to hand. Susan pushed a chair into the far corner and sat down in it, primly straightening out her robe as if it was eveningwear. With no room to help Mickey and Donna giving him a warning look every time he stepped closer to the controls, Dennis wandered into the next room to take a closer look at the MRI.

"It's not the same machine, I think," he called back.

"The controls seem pretty standard," Donna said. She leaned over them. Mickey thought it was for a closer look, before he realised she was resting heavily on one hand, rubbing at her temple with the other.

"Are you okay?" Mickey asked. "Maybe you should let Dennis do his thing."

"No, no." Donna waved him off. "I'm okay. I just got out of the habit of running all the time. It's-- Dennis!" She straightened up, banging on the window. "Get out of there!"

Mickey glanced through the glass to see Dennis take his head out of the machine and attempt to look innocent. Muffled thuds started to reach them from outside.

"If the MRI turned these things on, can it turn them off again?" Mickey asked.

"Maybe. The thing is, what if us doing this is what you saw Martha talking about in the vision?" Donna asked.

"But she's not here," Mickey pointed out.

"True."

Mickey lowered his voice. "She said something about patients, so as long as we don't try it on Suzie-Blue there, we should be fine, right?"

"I have no idea," Donna admitted. "Having the Doctor in my head is like having a cheat sheet for all the technology and the time stuff. You know: the general weirdness. It doesn't help too much with specifics. I've never really understood how much he just makes stuff up as he goes along. Well, in this incarnation, anyway. You know about regeneration?"

"First time I met him, he was a Northern bloke with big ears," Mickey said.

"They talked about regeneration on Terminus," Dennis said, sticking his head back into the room. "Aren't you going to come and sonic the machine?"

"Why would I do that?" Donna asked.

Dennis shrugged. "It's what the Doctor always does. Meet the monsters, run away from the monsters, shout at the monsters, sonic something, and win the day!"

Mickey considered this, and then nodded. "Yeah, that about covers it."

"Best get on with it, then," Donna said.

Moving with sudden purpose, she crossed into the MRI chamber, pulling out the sonic-screwdriver again. She started poking around the inside, while ordering Dennis to take off the maintenance hatch and Mickey to familiarise himself with the controls. Trying to ignore the continuing bangs from the background, he found the instruction manual and started flipping through it. A breeze caught a page and tried to turn it back and it was only after he pushed it flat that it occurred to him that he was in a sealed room.

"Did anyone else feel--" he started.

Susan, in the corner, pulled into herself even more. Dennis looked around wildly, while Donna suddenly gasped, rubbing at her forehead. A groaning, wheezing, howling noise filled the rooms around them.

"Huh," said Mickey.

Electricity sparked all over the MRI machine and then it twisted sideways -- Donna only just pulling Dennis out of the way -- in order to allow a large blue box with the familiar white-lettered "Police Public Call Box" header to force its way into the corner of the room.

"--believe you did that," Martha said over her shoulder as she came out of the door. "It's--" She saw the audience and blinked. "Uh. Doc--"

Another woman came out and bumped into Martha. She was wearing a white linen suit and the Doctor's coat, and carrying the Doctor's sonic screwdriver and saying, "remember to pump the helmic regulator to keep it in the sweet spot" in a very Doctor-ish sort of way and Mickey suddenly had a very strange suspicion, not helped by Martha loudly whispering "Doctor!"

"What?"

"We're not alone."

"Of course not," the woman said. "We live in a cosmos teeming with infinite varieties of life and, goodness me! Donna Noble!" She crossed the room in a couple of strides and hugged Donna hard. "Brilliant! Wait, why isn't your brain melting?"

"Neuroenhancer," said Dennis. "Hello!"

"Er," said Mickey, coming to the door. "Who are you?"

"That's right! Mickey the idiot!" The woman bounded over and hugged him as well. "You're looking well. You should shave, though. Seriously, lose the stubble-beard, it looks terrible. But you--!"

She swung back to Donna, beaming. "You look brilliant! And I'm not just saying that because the last time I saw you, you were dying. Well, no, technically, you were on the phone in your kitchen, but close enough."

"How come I didn't get hugged?" Dennis asked.

Donna ignored him, peering at the woman. "Is that you in there, spaceman?"

"Regeneration," she said. "What do you think?"

"Oh my god," Mickey said. "You're a time trannie!"

"Mickey!" Martha said, aghast.

"It's me," the woman insisted. "You know, I say 'the Doctor', you say 'Dr Who', I say 'That's right'? No?"

"Doctor," said Donna carefully. The Doctor nodded. Donna slapped her.

"Ow!" The Doctor rubbed her jaw. "What was that for? I think you loosened a tooth."

"Thank you for saving my life," Donna said. "I appreciate it, really."

"You're welcome?"

"Why did you regenerate?" Dennis asked. "Was it the RBT thing? Was Aliz evil all along? Where is she? Was it the blonde woman? Only we found one, but I don't think she's very with it, really, meaning no offense! I found Donna and she found Mickey and he drove us here and there are all these Inferi outside who aren't dead! They're living Inferi! Isn't that weird?"

"Very. Who are you again?"

"Do you still have concussion?"

"Never mind all that," Donna said. "Come and help me retune this MRI to augment delta waves."

"Brilliant!"

"Can't we all just leave in the TARDIS?" Mickey asked. The two women, engrossed, ignored him. "Never mind the hordes of zombies or anything."

"Hello," said Dennis to Martha. "I'm Dennis Creevey! We met briefly earlier."

"You look so much like this boy I knew in 1914," Martha started, and then interrupted herself to ask, "Creevey?"

"I find it's best to just go with these things," Mickey said. "Did I ever tell you about the time I snogged the Queen of France?"

Martha shook herself, as if out of a dream, and turning back to Mickey, said, "You didn't happen to see my notes, did you? Lab results and things."

"No?" Mickey considered. "Wait, maybe. Come on."

He led her back into the observation room. The bangs from outside were getting louder, but they still seemed to be on the outer barricade, not the inner one.

"How did you end up here, anyway?" Mickey asked, waving Martha towards the table.

"The Doctor was tracking artron energy. Since we're all time-travellers, it must have locked onto you guys instead of the time tunnel," Martha guessed, spreading the papers out. "Yes! Look at this -- see these results from the white blood cell count? And the T-cell counts? That's an artron energy strengthened immune system. I was right; the whole thing was a set-up. But why? And what -- I mean, are they infected despite the energy, or because of it? Who would do that?"

She looked at Mickey for help, and he shrugged.

"Beats me. Oh," he added, nodding at the chair in the corner. "That's Susan. She's a patient here."

Martha turned, startled to see someone there. "I'm sorry, I didn't see you--"

"No," Susan agreed, leaning forward into the light. "People often don't."

"But, hold on," Martha said, eyes widening in horrified recognition. "Oh, my god -- that's _Lucy Saxon_."

"Who?" Mickey asked. Dennis shrugged.

"Oh, all right then," said Lucy, straightening up, sticking her hands in her pockets and grinning at them. "It's me. Ta-da!" She laughed.

Mickey had no idea what was going on, but he recognised crazy when he saw it, and pointed his stunner at her. "Get your hands up, where I can see them!"

"Say please." When he just waved the stunner again, Lucy laughed. "Just kidding. Oh, and please--" She raised her hands. Light gleamed off the Lazarus Labs logo on her ring. "--call me Master."

Mickey could see nothing except her smirk. The world exploded into blood red light and darkness and somewhere, all around them, a deep bell pounded like the slow beats of some giant, twisted heart.


	6. PART FIVE: LUCY

She had felt like a fairytale princess. He had made her feel like that. Harold Saxon. The Master. He had told her-- No. He had let her tell herself a story, to make herself part of it; an old story, a good one, where the charming prince brings succour to the ailing king and love to his flaxen-crowned daughter. He had shown her such wonders on Earth, such beautiful strangeness. He had courted her on a ship like a box of memories, containing so much more than trinkets. Then he had taken her to the end, to the furnaces and the sick-sweet smell and, while she stared, down and down into the deeper dark, clinging to him in case she fell into that emptiness, fell and fell and never stopped... He had told her what they were burning.

There wasn't much left of Lucy after that. A pretty, fragile, hollowed out shell that walked like a woman, that talked like a wife.

"And then you tried to take away even that," she mused. "You tried to make it like it never happened. All just make-believe. But you can't wish the monsters away so easily. I remembered. They tried to tell me it was all in my head; so what? Isn't everything?"

Lucy looked around for response. The others, Martha and Donna, Mickey and Dennis -- MD, MD, all those Doctors, it was fate, obviously -- seemed too busy trying to escape from the tables they were cuffed to.

"What happened to being trained by Houdini?" Donna complained.

"A very good runner," the Doctor said. "Lovely legs!"

"Quiet!" Lucy snapped. "This is the part where we stop and have a nice little chat while I tell you all my plans."

"Are they sheer elegance in their simplicity?" Dennis asked.

Lucy stared. "Who are you again?"

"Dennis Creevey," he said. "If you let me up, I could shake your hand! It's only polite."

"No, I don't think so." Lucy waved a hand at the room, which was more a box of radiation shields surrounding the five-pronged star of the tables, which radiated out from Lucy and the central control core. "My time corridor wasn't big enough for all of us. I could have just brought Martha, of course, but these things need an audience, don't you think? And so I took your TARDIS and brought you here, to Terminus. That's a good place to have an end, isn't it? Terminus?"

"Oh god," said Martha, banging her head on the table. "We're going to be punned to death."

"This wouldn't have happened if I'd had my wand," Dennis groused. "If--"

He yelped as Lucy smashed a metal pan down against the bed, narrowly missing his head. She did it again, again, and again, all while yelling, screaming, "I AM TALKING AND WHEN I AM TALKING, YOU WILL! ATTEND! CAREFULLY! YOU WILL OBEY ME! YOU! WILL! OBEY! ME!"

The pan hit one of the shields so hard it dented. The echoes faded until there was nothing but her panting, and that too slowed into silence.

"Stars have shadows, you know," Lucy said, conversationally. "Vast coronas of anti-light, spilling out into the Negaverse. You can't have one without the other. That's just how it works."

They waited for her to continue. She didn't.

Mickey asked, "You do understand that you're totally bat-shit, right?"

Lucy sighed. "There is a Doctor, so there needs to be a Master," she explained, very slowly and clearly, lecturing children. "They go together. Yin and Yang. Hope and Glory."

"Shiver and Shake?" Donna offered.

"There had to be a sequel, of course," Lucy said. "That's how these things work. I collected the neurorecorder from the pyre. I had his biodata. I found the corridor leading here, easier to traverse each time I used it, as if it was just waiting for me, like destiny, as if I was meant to come here; here, with all its wonderful technology. I just needed the right source, the perfect start -- and then I thought of Martha Jones! Travelling Jones, wandering all around the world for an entire year, telling the Master's story."

"It was the Doctor's story," Martha said fiercely.

"But it was about the Master," Lucy said. "That's the point, you see. In order to tell the Doctor's story, you have to have the Master. The Master makes the story. He gives it purpose. He gives you purpose."

"I give myself purpose," Martha said.

"Good for you!" said the Doctor.

"Fat lot of use you are," Mickey muttered, in a loud sort of way, twisting inside his restraints.

"I gave myself purpose too," Lucy said, smiling at nothing, lifting her hands and twirling, wobbling in some parody of a dance. "I could hear it, whispering. Feel it, around the edges of things. Finding its way to me. Harry had made me better, you know. That's what they do. They make you better. They make you _more_. I could hear the four-beat rhythm of his hearts. Knocking. Inviting. Just waiting for me to open the door, to give him form again. To make him real again. To--"

"Did you look through the keyhole first?" the Doctor asked.

"I-- what?" Lucy frowned at her. "What?"

"To see who was knocking. You never know when you're going to get unexpected eWay salesmen or Silent Witnesses. They evangelise in mime." There were muffled thuds as the Doctor tried to demonstrate and found the cuffs still in the way. "Well, you'd just have to imagine me waving my hands around." Her voice went low, friendly and coaxing. "You're good at that, aren't you, Lucy? Imagining things? Can you see it, in your head? My hands, free, making shapes in the air? Framing words, gesturing stories?"

"Stop it!" Lucy snapped. "You're just trying to, to--"

"To what?" the Doctor asked gently.

"To confuse me! To trick me!"

"No one is trying to trick you," Martha said, soothingly. (Donna lifted her head up to glare at Dennis before he could say anything.) "You're right, Lucy. It did happen, that whole year. It was real, even if we're the only ones that remember. _All_ of it was real, Lucy. The Master died. He made himself die, to beat the Doctor for one final time. That was 'The End.' That ring, it's just a ring."

"It's a circle," Lucy insisted. "A sign. Circles within circles, bringing me back here. Bringing everything back at the end, just like before. This has happened; this is happening; this will always happen. Without the Master there's no point to anything. No point at all. It's all just... Stuff."

"Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?" Dennis offered.

"Good old Shakespeare," said the Doctor, beaming.

"Doctor," Martha ground out. "Not. Helping."

"And that's why I have to pull this lever," Lucy said. "The artron energy already in your bodies, when combined with the reverse biotemporal field, will create a sort of hole in our personal timelines, through which the Master will be drawn into me. We will become as one. The Master! Reborn! So! Basically, um-- Here goes!"

Lucy pulled the lever. There was a very slight increase in the vibrations from the engines.

She sighed. "That wasn't very dramatic, was it? I lost it a little towards the end there, and it takes a few minutes for the engines to properly warm up. I should have thrown the lever and then done the speech. Well, I'm sure I'll know better once I'm the Master of all."

"Thousand chocolate frogs moment?" Dennis asked.

"Ten thousand, I should think," the Doctor said, "although it's a bit hard to be accurate when your unit of measurement is confectionary."

"The Master isn't coming back," Martha said.

"Probably," the Doctor put in. Martha lifted her head, twisting to look at her. The Doctor shrugged as best she could while restrained. "Well, he was a genius. You never know."

"Lucy," Martha tried. "He hurt you. Don't you remember that? He used you and he hurt you--"

"You can't judge an alien by human standards," Lucy said primly. "That's very ethnocentric of you, Martha. If you don't have anything nice to say, you shouldn't say anything. Good girls should be seen, not heard. And that goes for you too, Doctor, and you--"

"Why does no-one remember my name?" Dennis complained. "It's only four syllables. Den-nis-cree-vee! Den-nis-cree-vee!"

"You know what, though, Lucy," said Donna. "You know what-- Oi! Look at me when I'm talking!"

"You really have the most terrible manners," Lucy complained, turning to Donna. "Oh, go on then."

"You've got it all planned out, I can tell. Getting us all together, getting us here, getting your little machine going. Fantastic, really. Only there's one thing you haven't been doing," said Donna.

"Oh?" Lucy gave her a puzzled smile. "And what might that be?"

Donna grinned. "You haven't been paying attention to Mickey."

Lucy swung around, cursing when she found the bed empty, the restraints picked. She spun back in time to see Mickey at the controls, pushing things at random.

"Don't touch that!" she screamed, throwing herself at him.

They crashed into the controls, rolling around them, Mickey trying to hold Lucy off, Lucy trying to jam her nails into his eyeballs and her knees into his groin.

"Dodge and weave," Dennis suggested. "It works in Quidditch!"

"This is no time for gallantry," Donna yelled. "Punch her in the face!"

"Donna!" complained the Doctor.

"Just get us out of here," Martha yelled.

"I'm. Trying." Mickey snapped back. He tried to pin Lucy down but she was slippery and vicious and had very sharp heels. "Why are crazy people always so damn strong?"

Lucy pulled herself up with dignity. "I," she said haughtily, "am not insane. This is a rational, realistic response to an insane universe inexorably falling into the never-ending dark and-- Hey!"

Mickey had found the restraint release controls for the beds. Lucy realised she had been distracted too quickly for him to work out which was which, throwing herself at him again and, as they went tumbling, he slapped one at random.

"Hey!" Dennis beamed. "I'm free!"

"Different button," Martha and Donna yelled together.

"Busy," Mickey managed before Lucy pulled him back down behind the controls again.

"I can press buttons," Dennis said, swinging himself off the bed. "Did you see which ones?"

There was a crash as Mickey and Lucy fell into one of the radiation screens, knocking it against the wall. Dennis ignored it, examining the central controls. Now he could see them without having to crane his neck right back, they looked oddly like the console from the TARDIS, buttons and levers going right around the rounded hexagonal shape.

"There are lots of them," Dennis said. "I'm sure there weren't that many before. In fact, I don't think these controls were here at all. Um." He pulled a lever. The vibration in the floor became an audible hum. "No, that wasn't it! Don't worry, I'll have you out in a--"

"Proud and insolent youth!" Lucy cried, clawing at him.

Dennis swatted at her hands as Mickey grabbed her from behind, dragging her away again. A stray elbow knocked a set of switches up and half the lights went off, while the other half blazed up bright.

"Okay, not those, either!"

"Look for a manual," Martha suggested.

"Or a plug," Mickey called.

"When I am the Master, I will make action figures of you all and keep you as playthings," Lucy growled out, from where she was straddling Mickey, trying to bang his head against the floor. He caught her wrists and they went rolling again.

"Just get my sonic-screwdriver out," the Doctor said.

"Or mine," Donna added, "before you--"

The lights crackled and died. Lucy howled in the dark. There was a thud and Mickey yelped in pain.

"Dennis!" Donna called. "Over here!"

"I'm coming!" There was another crash. "Whose bed was that?"

"I think the lights are coming back," Martha said. "I can see something-- Oh my god!"

Gold light blossomed out from the controls, suffusing the room. Its centre grew brighter and brighter and then a sudden dark spot burst in the middle of it, spreading out like ink dropped in water, sketching out arms and legs, a snappy suit and a mesmerising smile.

"Master," Lucy breathed out reverently. Even with Mickey's entire weight on her, she still managed to claw her way forward, inch by hard-fought inch.

"But it can't be!" Martha yanked harder at her restraints, shaking the bed.

"Inside pocket," Donna snapped at Dennis, who had finally reached her. "Hurry!"

"I've got it," he said, just as Lucy managed to throw Mickey off with inhuman strength. She lunged towards the solidifying figure and Dennis swung her way, wand whipping around and--

"Dennis! That's not your wand, it's the sonic screwdriver!"

\--shouted, " _Stupe--_ What?"

Magic met superscience, pumping into the power cells until they exploded, shattering the casing, which vaporised in Dennis's hand. A wall of sonic force slammed outwards in every direction simultaneously, echoing back from the ceiling and the radiation screens, reflecting in impossible directions from the blazing controls. It roared and screaming louder and louder, too loud to hear, vibrating in their bones, in the walls and floor and ceiling, in the whole station, out and out, until the whole universe shook itself apart and fell away around them.

* * *

_For a moment, she is nowhere, everywhere, elsewhere. There is a white rabbit. It takes a watch from its waistcoat and shakes its head, big ears flopping every which way. The watch is closed, but still the rabbit says, "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!"_

_"What do you mean by that?" she asks. "Explain yourself."_

_"I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir," says the rabbit (and this is wrong, she knows, it shouldn't be the rabbit, it should be Alice; it's Alice who says this), "because I'm not myself, you see."_

_Intricate spirals cover the watch, round and round like a caucus race. She takes it and turns it over me. Someone has scratched 'op3n m3' on the back. She holds the rabbit's paw for luck, and does._

* * *

Donna blinked and opened her eyes, which really shouldn't have been physically possible. Clearly, it was that sort of day. The metal ceiling remained blandly indifferent. As she sat up, people moved all around her. Dennis crawled out from under a toppled radiation screen. Martha picked herself up off the wreckage of a bed. Mickey pulled himself up by the wall, clutching at his head. The Doctor, her white linen suit somehow still immaculate, was helping Lucy up. The half-ghost shape in the light continued to grin at them from its translucent face. Through it, Donna could make out a dark-haired woman in a brown velvet jacket give a hand-up to the Doctor, whose pinstriped suit was--

"Nyssa?" asked Donna and then, with mounting confusion, "Wait, Doctor?"

"Yes?" both Doctors said.

They looked at each other. The male Doctor's gaze narrowed. The female Doctor's eyebrows arched up.

"There are two of them," Dennis said. "You're not supposed to cross your own timeline! That's very bad!"

"There are bat things," Mickey agreed, staring.

"Doctor?" Martha asked.

"Martha Jones!" He beamed at her. "Oh, but it's Martha Milligan now, isn't it?"

"I use both names," she said, staring. "But. You're you. You said you-- I mean, she said she regenerated, but you're still-- She had the TARDIS!"

"Don't let them touch!" Dennis said. "Things will go boom!" He frowned. "Unless things going boom is why you regenerate and go back to find out what's going on so you can end up here to go boom, in which case you should touch, because otherwise that's a paradox!"

"What have you done to my laboratory?" Aliz complained.

"Tricks," Lucy cried. "Lies and trickery! That's all you ever have, Doctor! Doctors!" She struggled, but the female Doctor was holding her fast, to Mickey's annoyance.

"Venusian aikido," she explained.

"Who are you people?" Aliz asked. "Dennis? What's going on?"

"You remembered my name!" Dennis beamed. She stared. "Oh! Right! Well, I fell down a tunnel and I ended up in the past, so I fetched Donna, who used to travel with the Doctor, and she took us to Mickey, and he brought us to this other hospital, where we met Martha and the lady Doctor! Then Lucy kidnapped us all here to bring back the Master, who is also a Time Lord! But evil!"

"I'm sorry," Aliz said, trying to follow that, "but isn't this the Doctor?" She gestured at the man beside her as she turned to the other one. "Who are you?"

"Dr Who," the Doctor said.

"That's what I keep telling people," Dr Who said.

"Right," said Aliz, clearly still confused. "And that--?" She pointed at the figure in the light. It didn't seem to be getting any more solid, but it hadn't gone away either. "That's the Master?"

"Yes," cried Lucy.

"No," said the Doctor.

"Maybe not yet," Lucy said, "but soon. He will join with me, and we will rule as one Master over all."

"I'm sorry," the Doctor said. "I'm so sorry--"

"Don't you come near me!" she screamed at him.

He stopped, holding his hands up. "Listen to me. Just listen!"

"It's okay," soothed Dr Who. "No one is going to hurt you, Lucy. There's no rush. Take your time. We have as much as you want. No one is moving. We're all still, all of us. Just breathing in, and out. In. And out. In," she said, and Lucy breathed in, and Martha, they all did, together and together they all breathed "Out. In. And out."

Lucy relaxed against her, and Dr Who smiled, but in the next moment, Lucy had snatched up her sonic screwdriver and danced away, holding it on all of them.

"Stay back," she yelled. "All of you!" Mickey took a step towards her from behind, but she swung around, deft fingers resetting the controls as she aimed. There was a buzzing hum and he fell back, clutching at his head. "That's the resonance frequency of human bone. Your own bodies will liquefy your organs, so don't you come any closer."

"You need to listen," the Doctor said. "What's happening here, it's not what you think. Look!" He pointed at Dennis who blinked, making a 'who, me?' gesture. "Look at him!"

Lucy did, aiming the screwdriver. "Drop the wand, boy!"

Dennis held up his empty hands. "Donna still has it."

"Then you drop it," Lucy insisted, turning on her.

"Okay, okay." Donna pulled the wand out and dropped it at her feet.

"Listen to yourself," the Doctor said. "Who has a wand? It's not real. He's not real."

"Um," said Dennis. "Yes, I am? Wait, I mean, no, no, I am not real, this is all just your imagination, Lucy." He winked at the Doctor, grinning.

The Doctor sighed, mussing his hair. "That's not what I-- Well, no, actually that is what I meant. This _is_ your imagination."

"I'm not crazy," Lucy insisted. "I am the Master. I will be the Master."

"Not the master you think you'll be," the Doctor said. "Lucy, there are places, certain forbidden regions of space and time, where the rules of the universe aren't governed by what can be, but by what might. Places where there is no difference between the thought of a thing and the thing itself, where ideas drive causality, where Gulliver fights toy soldiers and Rapunzel lets down her hair for cartoon heroes."

"I don't understand," Lucy said. "Those are just-- You're talking about stories!"

"Yes!" The Doctor nodded. "That's exactly what I'm talking about."

"The Land of Fiction," Donna said.

"It was sealed off," the Doctor explained. "The Time Lords placed a barrier around it -- but it was breached once before, years and bodies ago for me; every major shift in the web of time reopens tiny cracks, letting tiny amounts of energy escape." 

"The Time War," Dr Who said. 

"Bad Wolf," Mickey suggested. 

"The paradox machine," Martha said.

"The reality bomb," Donna said.

"All of them, building up and building up, until something breaks," the Doctor said, "and the power comes rushing out, looking to be used. Desperate to be used. And the right person, in the right place, at the right time, can suddenly become a focus for all that potential. They can become the master of fiction."

"No," Lucy said, quietly, shaking her head.

"A sudden combination of stray thoughts can pluck a minor character from a well read book and add him to a TARDIS," the Doctor said.

"Wait," said Dennis. "Are you talking about me? Just because I'm in a book doesn't make me not real. You're in lots of history books!"

"I told a story," Martha said. "I walked the world for a year and I told a bloody story!" She was staring at Dr Who. "I told-- This is mad!"

"'We're all mad here'," Mickey said.

"But that doesn't make us not real," Dennis complained.

"And you, Lucy," the Doctor said gently. "Poor, brilliant, Lucy. It was soft at first, wasn't it? Just a whisper. Not quite a dream, not quite a memory."

"It was the ring," she said. "I wanted a keepsake, of Harry. I made a promise, you see. For better or for worse. It spoke to me."

The Doctor shook his head. "You told yourself a story. You, who had been to the end of the universe and back and lived on top of a paradox machine for a year that never was; you told yourself a story. And the more you told it, the realer it became. The more it infected you and everything you did, everything you touched."

"The Inferi!" Dennis put in.

"Hang on," said Mickey. "You mean they acted like zombies because we thought they would?"

"Infected by Fiction," the Doctor said. "Infected and infectious, warping the world to fit your own narrative, to fit your need; it granted you access to this place. It granted you an echo of what you had lost. Did he tell you he loved you? Did he promise you the stars? Was he, finally, the man you always dreamed of?"

"Doctor, don't." Even Martha seemed surprised she'd spoken.

Lucy sneered. "You're so much like him. So sure of yourself, arrogant and dictatorial, coming in from the outside and telling us how we should be doing things. Ordering us around. Wanting everything on your own terms. The things he told me. Have they ever asked, Doctor? Why so many species look just like us? Have they ever asked just how long and how often you have been on Earth? Have they asked about the cracks in your own continuity, the loops and stitches and hasty fixes?"

"Stop it," the Doctor snapped.

"You wear your name like a mask." Lucy chuckled, a wild, hard-edged sound. "Little boy, shouting at the dark. 'Just stop, just listen to me!' You're nothing but quicksilver, Doctor."

"You're right," Martha said quietly. Lucy rounded on her, screwdriver brandished. Martha didn't move. "You are though. The Doctor, he's not what he seems."

Behind Lucy, Mickey started to speak, but Donna waved him quiet.

Martha continued, "You get an idea in your head about what people should be, and you love them. You love them so much, you do everything you can, change anything, chance anything, just to make it real. To make them see you, to really see you. You tell a story, and you make yourself a part of it and you tell yourself that doesn't matter, because the story is really about them, which makes it a kind of truth, in a way."

The gold light pulsed. The dark figure in it held his arms out, lips curling, hands making little come-on motions, an invitation to an embrace. Lucy looked over, looked away, looked back, and looked away again. The screwdriver wavered.

"Except, the longer you're around them, the more you can see the story doesn't work, and the harder you have to try to keep it going, until, one day, you realise that the story is all you have." Martha could see Mickey nodding behind Lucy. She didn't dare turn her head to see what the others were doing, though she could feel the Doctors watching her. "And some people, they go on living that lie, until there's nothing left of themselves, until there really is no point."

"Then you understand," Lucy suddenly wailed. "You understand why I have to do this!"

"But I know you," Martha insisted. "I do. You're not crazy, Lucy. Other people would be. People who had been where you have been, who have seen what you have seen. I know you, Lucy. I've _been_ you. And you're better than he is. The Master? He's nothing! A naughty schoolboy, tearing the wings off flies, breaking all his toys because he can, because he doesn't know better. But he didn't break you, Lucy. You said he hollowed you out, but he didn't. He didn't take everything. He couldn't. I know because right there, at the end, when all hope should have been lost, I saw you. I saw you say the Doctor's name."

"I-- I don't--" Lucy glanced towards the smiling figure and back at Martha. The screwdriver slipped lower.

"You don't need to be the Master, Lucy," Martha said. "You've already beaten him. You won, Lucy."

The screwdriver slipped from limp fingers to clatter on the floor. Lucy sank to her knees, beginning to sob. She would have fallen the rest of the way if Martha hadn't caught her, holding her close and stroking her hair.

"Shh," she whispered. "It's okay. It's all right."

Donna picked the screwdriver up, and Dennis's wand, and offered them to their respective owners.

"I notice mine got blown up," Mickey said.

"Sorry," said Dennis. His heart clearly wasn't in it. He was looking at the Doctor, his face somehow both hopeful and betrayed, all at once.

"Are we safe to move?" Aliz asked. "Explaining this to my employer will be some task."

"Queens Boudacia?" the Doctor said. "I shouldn't think you'll have to."

"The Saxon queen," Dr Who agreed. "You should have seen this coming."

"Of course I did," the Doctor complained. "I mean, really, Aliz down the RBT hole?"

"Why are you all acting like it's over?" Aliz asked, over this. "I've got to shut the biotemporal fields down before the station implodes."

She dodged around Martha and Lucy, heading for the central controls. Donna cried out, but Aliz's hand was already on the lever. Light surged, washing over her, and the dark figure came with it, wrapping itself around her. Aliz screamed. It rapidly became laughter as the light faded and she turned to face them. Her clothes had changed, subtly darker, more martial. The comb had gone from her hair, which now fell thicker and straighter. Her eyes filled with manic light but her voice was smooth and sure.

"Doctor," she said. "We meet at last."

"Come on," the Doctor said, ignoring her and addressing Martha. "My TARDIS is just upstairs. I'll take you home."

"Oi, spaceman," Donna said. "Mass murdering Martian megalomaniac, just possessed Nyssa!"

"As I took the body of her father," the Master agreed, chuckling. "I do like a nice Trakenite. Not quite Gallifreyan standard but ever so versatile. The lack of Cheetah virus is nice, too. Now, hand me control of your TARDIS, or I'll detonate Terminus's fuel pod. Event Two: the End of the Universe!" She let out an evil laugh.

"Don't be stupid," the Doctor said. "Weren't you listening? You're not real. You're a story that doesn't know it's ended."

"Do you think I'm bluffing?" The Master's hand dropped to the controls. "Countless billions of lives will end at the push of--"

There was a muffled whumpf as the controls imploded and then exploded. Chocolate frogs rained down across the room.

The Doctor sighed. "Dennis!"

"You said I wasn't real." Dennis sniffed. "I don't see why I have to obey the rules if you're going to go around saying I'm not real."

"You're not real!" the Doctor insisted.

"This isn't the end, Doctor," the Master cried. "You'll--"

There was an electric crackle and she fell over. Everyone looked at Dennis, who said, "It wasn't me!" They all looked at Mickey instead.

"What?"

The Doctor sighed again. "What have I said about guns?"

"It's a stunner," Mickey complained, waving it. "It's safe and non-lethal!"

"Can we just leave, please?" the Doctor asked, plaintively. "Without Lucy to focus it, the fictional energy will slowly disperse. It'll all just fade away."

"And us along with it," Dr Who mused. "Still, I've done it before, with Jason. I don't remember it being too bad. But then I wouldn't, I suppose."

"I like chocolate frogs," Dennis said. "I like Weird Sisters, and watching Quidditch, and playing, too, although I never really mastered the broom. I like beetroot and radishes and I'm allergic to lime. I have a brother, and a dad, who's a milkman. I once accidentally made all the milk bottles explode on his float, and he didn't yell at me, although he did make me tidy it up. I want to be an Unspeakable when I'm older and research space and time and planets and maybe show people some of the things I saw in the TARDIS. I talk too quickly and I don't think things through enough, but I try. I do try. I listen when people talk, and I ask questions when I don't understand, and I'll try anything, me. And I'm going to get a giant squid to keep as a pet and call him Squiddy II and get him to give kids rides so they're not scared when they go to Hogwarts. I get sad, and scared, and angry, and happy. I laugh, I cry, I bruise if you hit me, so please don't, and I maybe have a girlfriend, if Natalie will go out with me. I live, and I love, and so what if I came from a book? I'm _real_ to me!"

"Doctor," Martha said. "Do something."

"Do what?" the Doctor asked. "What? I'm really, genuinely asking. What would you have me do? None of this is-- They're fictional!"

Donna rolled her eyes. "So give them a happy ending, dumbo!"

The Doctor stared at her. She stared resolutely back. After a long moment, he began to grin. "Donna Noble, you are brilliant. And you, Martha Jones, and you, Mickey Smith. Brilliant!"

Dennis sniffed, rubbing his face on his sleeve and managing a shaky smile. "What about me?"

"You, Dennis Creevey?" The Doctor smiled hugely. "You were _really_ brilliant. They'll tell tales about how you brilliant you are."

"They will?" Dennis asked, smiling properly. "A tale for me?"

"Ohhh, yes," the Doctor crowed. "It's a good one, too. It goes like this. Once upon a time..."


	7. Epilogue

"One day, he shall come back," Lucy insisted. "Yes, he shall come back." She mumbled something, voice rising again to add, "I am not mistaken" before falling away.

The orderlies quietly closed the door, locking it behind them. They watched through the observation window for a moment. Lucy rocked a little in the middle of the bed, pulled in on herself, mouth moving silently.

"They'll have her out in weeks," one of the orderlies said. "Bloody Care in the Community bollocks."

"There are outreach programs and such," the other orderly replied. "Anyway, none of our business what they do once they're out of here. Here, you reckon this is worth anything?"

"Bit tacky, ain't it? Is that a fractal or something? New Age claptrap," the first said. "Just stick it in with the rest of stuff."

"Reckon they'll give it back then?" the second asked.

"Why not? It's just a bloody ring."

* * *

They'd driven back to Clancy's. Mickey had offered to take Donna all the way home, but she'd insisted the walk would do her good, so walk they did, in what passes for companionable silence when one of you is thinking very hard and the other is watching you to see if your brains are going to start coming out of your ears.

"I've got the retcon," Mickey said eventually.

"I've got hours yet," Donna insisted. "Chemical half-life and all that; I could do the maths for you if you have a pencil and an envelope to scribble on. I always do better maths on the back of an envelope. No idea why. Psychologists' field day, probably. Or is it psychiatrist?"

"Rose made me go to a shrink once," Mickey said. "After, well... Anyway, couldn't see the point, really. You tell someone you're dying for a cuppa because the teas don't taste quite right and they start talking about displacement activity rather than it being because you're in a parallel universe."

"Yeah," Donna sighed.

"There have never been people like us," Mickey said.

"Except that Sarah Jane and her lot," Donna said.

"Yeah, okay."

"And the stud-muffin and his pals."

"There haven't been _many_ people like us," Mickey said. "You'd do it all again, though, wouldn't you?"

"In a heartsbeat," Donna said, and Mickey chuckled. "He needs us; and I'll see him again, I know it. I feel it in my water."

"I don't wanna know about your water," Mickey said.

Donna laughed, and they walked on in silence for a while, until Mickey realised she was no longer at his side and looked back.

"It's okay," she said. "Going back. It's not so bad, really. Where there's life, and all that. But you know what, though?"

"What?" asked Mickey.

"You can buy me a pint, first." She grinned, striding towards the Red Lion. "Come on, Ricky!"

"It's Mickey."

"It's Ricky."

"Don't start that again!"

* * *

It wasn't particularly late by the time Martha returned home, but it felt it somehow. It took her a while to get out of the car, feeling slow and heavy. Medically, she knew it was just a post-adrenaline crash, the body recuperating from all that blood-pumping tension. She could think of a dozen different cures, starting with simple sleep. At least two of them involved bananas.

Physician, heal thyself, she thought, but it wasn't funny.

Finally, she let herself in through the front door, closing and locking it behind her, throwing the bolt and arming the security systems, all automatically. When she stepped into the kitchen, there was a steaming mug of hot cocoa waiting on the breakfast bar. Spices tickled her nose and warmed her all the way down as she sipped.

She carried it into the lounge. Tom muted the TV, swinging his feet off the coffee table as he looked up and smiled at her. "I heard the car. Not a good day, huh?"

"It had its moments," Martha said, resting against the doorframe. She sipped the chilli-cocoa some more, watching him watch her.

Tom's smile went up a little at the corners, amused and inquisitive. "Do you need an invitation? I've been working on my bow."

"I want to tell you something. No," she corrected herself, "I want to retell you something, but properly, not broad strokes and loose implications."

"Story time?"

Martha shook her head. "It's not a story, it's just... It's a bunch of stuff, and it happened."

Tom nodded, patting the sofa. "Okay."

Putting her mug down on the table, she sat, drawing her legs up and wrapping her arms around them. He turned so he could watch her, leaning his head on his hand.

Martha took a deep breath and let it out. "The first time you met me," she said, "was not the first time I met you..."

* * *

Nowhere and nowhen, a big blue box twirled daintily down the outside edges of Creation, slipping along the stitches that held space and time together. In its smaller-on-the-outside interior, a woman (who in some places might have been considered South Asian) in a white linen suit and a young boy (who in some places might have been considered an English public school boy) in black-and-red robes stood side-by-side in the green-gold tidal glow of a hammer-coaxed time rotor.

"There we go," Dr Who said. "You can see the borders folding in on themselves, pulling the breach closed. It's barely a year wide, now. Soon it'll be small enough to fit in your hand."

Dennis nodding, munching on a chocolate frog.

"Well, maybe not your hand. You could use two. Still, if you had big hands, it would fit. The conclusion of this adventure is almost on us. One or two loose ends, but there always are--"

"We never did find the crown of Peladon," Dennis said.

"I'm sure it's one of those crates in the secondary control room."

"Or get Glitz out of the stocks in Little Hodcombe," Dennis added.

"Resourceful fellow," Dr Who said airily. "I'm sure he'll be long gone."

"Or--"

"Dennis."

"Yes, Doctor?"

"Stop talking."

"Yes, Doctor." Dennis beamed.

"Here it goes," Dr Who said, tapping the screen. "Collapsing down towards the final punctuation, the ultimate line-break, and then..."

"And then?" Dennis prompted.

"And then I thought we'd check out rumours I've been hearing of untoward happenings on the diamond coral reefs Kaata Flo Ko. Come on, Dennis! There's work to be done!"

* * *

You have been reading  
Scenes from a Time Travelling Life

Starring

Meera Syal as Dr Who  
Thomas Sangster as Dennis Creevey

_the Doctor reads. He carefully closes the book and brushes his hand across the cover, feeling the raised lettering of the title, seeing familiar faces covered and revealed by his fingertips. He almost starts opening it -- it would be so easy, after all. That's what books are for, to be read. It's what all stories want: someone to begin them, and someone to finish them. They don't really care what happens between._

_"Once upon a time," he whispers, and then he finds an old shoebox in an copper kettle in a steamer trunk in a nook under stairs that lead from nowhere to nowhere in one of the more dusty wings of his beloved TARDIS, places the book carefully inside, and closes them all up again._

_It's a long walk back to the console room. He stands for a while, hands in his pockets, watching the time rotor rise and fall, rise and fall, and then he reaches out and pats the controls. The TARDIS hums softly, around him, inside._

_"Come on then, old girl," he says, smiling, just a little. "Where to next?"_


End file.
